Probabilistic Phonotactics as a Cue for Recognizing Spoken Cantonese Words in Speech

Previous experimental psycholinguistic studies suggested that the probabilistic phonotactics information might likely to hint the locations of word boundaries in continuous speech and hence posed an interesting solution to the empirical question on how we recognize/segment individual spoken word in speech. We investigated this issue by using Cantonese language as a testing case in the present study. A word-spotting task was used in which listeners were instructed to spot any Cantonese word from a series of nonsense sound sequences. We found that it was easier for the native Cantonese listeners to spot the target word in the nonsense sound sequences with high transitional probability phoneme combinations than those with low transitional probability phoneme combinations. These results concluded that native Cantonese listeners did make use of the transitional probability information to recognize the spoken word in speech.