Much of what we know about spoken-word recognition comes from studies relying on speech stimuli either carefully produced in the laboratory or computer altered. Although such stimuli have allowed key constructs to be highlighted, the extent to which these constructs are operative in the processing of everyday speech is unclear. We argue that studying the recognition of naturally occurring degra...

We investigate the impact of three different factors on the quality of talking heads as metaphors of a spoken dialogue system in the smart home domain. The main focus lies on the effect of voice and head characteristics on audio and video quality, as well as overall quality. Furthermore, the influence of interactivity and of media context on user perception is analysed. For this purpose two sub...

A large number of multisyllabic words contain syllables that are themselves words. Previous research using cross-modal priming and word-spotting tasks suggests that embedded words may be activated when the carrier word is heard. To determine the effects of an embedded word on processing of the larger word, processing times for matched pairs of bisyllabic words were examined to contrast the effe...

L2 listening can involve the phantom activation of words which are not actually in the input. All spoken-word recognition involves multiple concurrent activation of word candidates, with selection of the correct words achieved by a process of competition between them. L2 listening involves more such activation than L1 listening, and we report two studies illustrating this. First, in a lexical d...