What does the 'Cohort Model' explain regarding human spoken word recognition?
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: How listeners narrow candidate words matching a word's initial sounds until a unique point
The Cohort Model, proposed by William Marslen-Wilson, suggests that as the first speech sounds of a word enter the ear, all words starting with those phonemes are activated to form a 'cohort.' As more phonetic information arrives, mismatching words are systematically eliminated until only one target candidate remains at the 'uniqueness point.' This explains why humans can identify spoken words before they are fully finished.
Keep practicing
More Psycholinguistics questions
- Which of the following describes a 'garden-path sentence' in psycholinguistic processing?
- In the study of speech errors, what happens during a classic 'Spoonerism'?
- What psycholinguistic phenomenon is described by the 'Tip-of-the-Tongue' (TOT) state?
- How is 'Broca's Aphasia' clinically distinguished from 'Wernicke's Aphasia'?
- What is the primary assertion of Eric Lenneberg's 'Critical Period Hypothesis' in language acquisition?
- In the context of lexical access, what does the 'Word Frequency Effect' demonstrate?