Speech input is often noisy and ambiguous. Yet listenersusually do not have difficulties understanding it. A keyhypothesis is that in speech processing acoustic-phoneticbottom-up processing is complemented by top-downcontextual information. This context effect is larger when theambiguous word is only separated from a disambiguating wordby a few syllables compared to many syllables, suggesting thatthere is a limited time window for processing acoustic-phoneticinformation with the help of context. Here, we argue that therelative weight of bottom-up and top-down processes may bedifferent for languages that have different phonologicalproperties. We report an experiment comparing two closelyrelated languages, Danish and Norwegian. We show thatDanish speakers do indeed rely on context more thanNorwegian speakers do. These results highlight the importanceof investigating cross-linguistic differences in speechprocessing, suggesting that speakers of different languagesmay develop different language processing strategies.

Language processing depends on the integration of bottom-upinformation with top-down cues from several differentsources—primarily our knowledge of the real world, ofdiscourse contexts, and of how language works. Previousstudies have shown that factors pertaining to both the senderand the receiver of the message affect the relative weighting ofsuch information. Here, we suggest another factor that maychange our processing strategies: perceptual noise. Wehypothesize that listeners weight different sources of top-downinformation more in situations of perceptual noise than innoise-free situations. Using a sentence-picture matchingexperiment with four forced-choice alternatives, we show thatdegrading the speech input with noise compels the listeners torely more on top-down information in processing. We discussour results in light of previous findings in the literature,highlighting the need for a unified model of spoken languagecomprehension in different ecologically valid situations,including under noisy conditions.