Evidence for early effects of sentence context on word segmentation

The present paper focuses on the segmentation of two-word phrases containing two closely competing lexical hypotheses. It is hypothesized that the bottom-up information, which also includes a mechanism called the Possible-Word Constraint, is explored first in segmenting these phrases. Non-sensory sentential information influences this process at a later stage and only shows an effect if the bottom-up information does not lead to one dominating interpretation. The results of the present experiment show that listeners can and do make use of contextual information at a relatively early moment, at which the two possible segmentations are both still active and the bottom-up information has not yet suppressed the acoustically inconsistent interpretation. Hence, it was concluded that both sensory and non-sensory information is employed to affect activation levels of competing lexical hypotheses at an early moment.