Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Using the visual-word paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of word onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise. In two experiments, Dutch non-native listeners heard English target words, preceded by carrier sentences that were noise-free (Experiment 1) or contained intermittent noise (Experiment 2). Target words were either onset- or offset-masked or not masked at all. Analyses showed that onset masking delayed target word recognition more than offset masking did. These results suggest that – in line with contemporary models of spoken-word recognition – non-native listeners strongly rely on word onset information when hearing words in noise.