Brown A, Childers E, Bowen E, Zuckerburg G. Phonemes in continuous speech are better recognized in context than in isolation.

The contribution of context to speech perception has been extensively studied, but these studies have not always used stimuli that are representative of everyday human language.  The specific question of whether consonant context improves vowel identification, has only been tested via stimuli that are not continuous and therefore arguably are unrepresentative of spoken language. Additionally, studies in the relevant psycholinguistic literature are still suffused with multiple difficulties of interpretation; these include ceiling effects, different subject response formats, and a notable lack of natural stimuli. In the present study, we examine the effect of context on vowel recognition, via stimuli taken directly from natural continuous speech in an audiobook. All tested vowel sounds were better recognized with surrounding context than in isolation, providing a potentially novel contribution to the psycholinguistic literature on the utility of phonemic context and the use of continuous stimuli.