Dynamic re-weighting of acoustic and contextual cues in spoken word recognition

Listeners integrate acoustic and contextual cues during word recognition. However, experiments investigating this integration disrupt natural cue correlations. It was investigated whether changes in correlational structure affect listeners' relative cue weightings. Two groups of participants engaged in a word recognition task. In one group, acoustic (voice onset time) and contextual (lexical bias) cues followed natural correlations; in the other, cues were uncorrelated. When cues were correlated, cue weights were stable throughout the experiment; when cues were uncorrelated, contextual cues were down-weighted. Listeners thus can re-weight cues based on their statistical structure. Studies failing to account for re-weighting risk over/under-estimating cue importance.