Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Word recognition models such as Cohort have long relied on the gating paradigm to investigate how acoustic-phonetic information maps onto lexical representations. We report on a methodological study investigating (a) whether the recognition point of a spoken word is affected by the speech variables employed in the gating paradigm, and (b) which distributional properties of a words’ linguistic and social usage pattern affect its recognition point. We addressed the first question by contrasting the traditional “brute-force” gating paradigm (i.e., employing incremental segments of 50 ms) to “phonetically-driven” gating paradigms. Three methodologies were employed for determining phonemic segments: (1) articulatory measures, relying on the peak velocity of articulatory gestures, (2) acoustic measures, relying on the acoustic energy of consonants and vowels, and (3) brute-force measures, relying on 50 ms increments. We addressed the second question by relying on four social measures of lexical strength, which were attained from a corpus of 57 billion words from Reddit: word frequency (WF), contextual diversity (CD), discourse contextual diversity (DCD), and user contextual diversity (UCD). Results showed that the traditional brute-force gating method yielded significantly faster word recognition times, in comparison to articulatory and acoustically driven gating methods. Our results also showed that CD is a superior measure of lexical strength than WF, UCD, and DCD. Overall, our results suggest that the traditional gating paradigm is a reliable method for investigating spoken word recognition, given that spoken word recognition may rely on the gradual accumulation of phonetic information over time, rather than relying solely on the recovery of categorical phonetic features that are distributed non-linearly in time. We also suggest that the lexical system may be organized as a function of usage-based contextual measures of lexical items.