Prefixes versus suffixes: a search for a word-beginning superiority effect in word recognition from degraded speech

This paper reports on a word recognition experiment in search of evidence for a word- beginning superiority effect in recognition from low-quality speech . In the experiment, lexical redundancy was controlled by combining monosyllable word stems with strongly constraining or weakly constraining prefixes, suffixes and prefixsuffix combinations . The relative contr i bution of word beginnings versus endings was studied by comparing the effects of prefixes and suffixes on word recognition. Speech quality was controlled by using synthetic speech from diphones . The resulting acoustic forms were left intact for the affixes, but were degraded for the word stems by extreme temporal smoothing of synthesis parameters . The resulting acoustic form of each word stem was identical in each context in which it appeared . The dependent measure was fractions of words correct in a simple word recognition task with 48 listeners. The data, although highly variable, showed a strong, significant effect of lexical redundancy, no independent effect of word length and no difference in the contribution of prefixes versus suffixes to word recognition .