Word recognition from acoustic onsets and acoustic offsets: Effects of cohort size and syllabic stress

In the traditional gating technique, subjects hear increasing amounts of word-onset information from spoken words until the words can be correctly identified. The experiment reported here contrasted word-onset gating with results when words were gated from their word endings. A significant recognition advantage for words gated from their onsets was demonstrated. This effect was eliminated, however, when we took into account the number of word possibilities that shared overlapping phonology and the same stress pattern as the target words at their recognition points. These results support the position that the perceptual advantage of word-initial information can be understood within a general goodness-of-fit model of spoken word recognition.