Context speech rate and duration as cues to native and non-native perception of casually-spoken words in Russian
Elina Banzina, Laura C. Dilley, Bowling Green State University
How word duration and context speech rate affect lexical perception is unclear. We investigated the influence of these attributes on perception of casually-spoken Russian sentences. In Experiment 1, native Russian speakers performed a transcription task on sentences containing rate manipulations. Experiment 2 was a forced choice task using the same materials involving native Russian speakers and native English speakers with high or low proficiency in Russian. In both experiments, word duration and context speech rate influenced Russian lexical perception in all groups. The results suggest that relative timing cues are critical to accurate lexical perception in casual speech.