Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.