AUC PHILOLOGICA
AUC PHILOLOGICA

AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.

The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.

AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2022 No 1 (2022), 35–50

Word-boundary glottalization and its cognitive aspects: A reaction-time study

Michaela Svoboda, Pavel Šturm

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2022.27
published online: 17. 01. 2023

abstract

This paper deals with the perceptual impact of using word-initial glottalization as a boundary signal. Research into glottalization is discussed before presenting a reaction time (RT) experiment based on a word-monitoring paradigm that aims to investigate the cognitive effect of the presence of glottalization in native Czech listeners’ perception. Natural and acoustically manipulated sentences selected from a spontaneous political debate were used as stimuli. The low level of control of the material makes the design relatively innovative in comparison with similar previous studies. Fifty listeners were instructed to press a button as soon as they heard a specified target word embedded in a sentence, where a preceding carrier word included glottalization or linking. The results support the hypothesis that the presence of glottalization facilitates the processing of subsequent words, but the temporal scope of the effect varied. The experiment also raises new methodological issues and offers suggestions for further RT research.

keywords: cognition; Czech; glottalization; perception; reaction time

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