Discrimination point

In the context of the cohort model in psycholinguistics, the point of discrimination (or also: uniqueness point ) is the point in a chain of sounds (“word”) at which a listener can clearly identify the lexeme .

With word recognition, the listener benefits from the ability of many words to have a redundant end for faster decision-making.

• Example :
  A comparison of the two words strawberry and earthquake should illustrate when the discrimination point has been reached:

strawberry	earthquake
[ 'ɛɐ̯tbeːʁə ]	[ 'ɛɐ̯tbeːbən ]

If a listener hears the beginning of the word [ 'ɛɐ̯tbeː ] in isolation, he cannot yet decide whether the word heard is strawberry or earthquake . The cohort model assumes that both entries in the mental lexicon are "activated", that is, they compete with one another. The point of discrimination is only reached with the following sound, as the disambiguating information is accessible here. This representation is simplified because there are often more than two competing entries in the mental lexicon within a language. With many words, the point of discrimination is only reached with the last phonetic unit. The words cabin and cabinet are indistinguishable up to [ kabiːn ] , apart from the emphasis . Only with the following Schwa ( [⁠ ə ⁠] ) only remaining cabin as a possible word left.

literature

• William Marslen-Wilson, Lorraine Komisarjevsky Tyler: The temporal structure of spoken language understanding . In: Cognition , 8, 1980, pp. 1-71
• Rainer Dietrich: Psycholinguistics . 1st edition. 2002, Metzler, ISBN 3-476-10342-0