Listening in the Language Classroom (Cambridge Language Teaching Library) by John Field

Author:John Field [Field, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

10.4.1 Lexical segmentation

First language processing

We saw in Chapter 9 that spoken word forms are often subject to variation when they are produced in a sentence. Another complication is that there are no consistent gaps between words in connected speech as there are in most writing systems. The speaker pauses occasionally to plan what comes next, but not after each word. It is the listener who has to determine where in a piece of continuous speech one word ends and the next begins.

The operation, known as lexical segmentation, might seem a straightforward task if one has the vocabulary knowledge. Surely all a listener has to do is to match a group of sounds to a word. Once the match has been made, she can locate the end of the word and go on to seek a match for the next group of sounds. In fact, the process is not so easy. Suppose an L1 listener hears the word catalogue. The simplest matching routine would suggest that it consists of not one word but three: cat + a + log. Or consider a longer sequence such as The captain's in cabin eight. Possible matches that a listener might make include (beside the correct ones): cap, capped, tins, zinc, cab, in, innate.

One easy solution to this question suggests that the listener is capable of making use of context and co-text (including grammar) to resolve any ambiguities of the type described. Yes, indeed; but as we saw in Chapter 8, employing contextual and co-textual cues is both slow and demanding upon mental resources. The listener needs some other, more automatic, routine which enables her to make rapid matches with a low likelihood of failure.

Several theories have been put forward about the techniques that L1 listeners employ to locate word boundaries. The most convincing holds that listeners exploit the phonology of the language in question. For English, it appears that native listeners employ a metrical segmentation strategy (Cutler, 1990). In segmenting the speech stream into possible words, they are guided by the assumption that each stressed4 syllable marks a likely beginning for a word. The strategy makes sense because it has been calculated that somebody listening to English has a 90.2% chance of being right if she operates on the basis that each stressed syllable marks the beginning of a new content word.5

Another way of locating word boundaries lies in detecting frequently occurring syllables in the form of prefixes (marking the beginning of a word) and suffixes (marking the end). Prefixes and suffixes, like function words, are often of very low prominence; but it seems likely that L1 listeners become adept at recognising them because they are so frequent.

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