Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the positional and sequential
probabilities of speech sounds within and between spoken syllables and
words. I will discuss research examining the role of probabilistic
phonotactics in both the perception of isolated spoken words and the
detection of words in connected speech. Phonotactic effects reveal a
number of interesting properties about the architecture of the system
responsible for the perception of spoken language. In particular, effects
of probabilistic phonotactics provide insights into the levels of
representation and process involved in spoken word recognition, as well as
the role of form-based lexical representations in segmenting words from
the speech stream. I will argue that accounting for the role of
phonotactics in recognition provides an important evaluation metric for
current theories of spoken word recognition.
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