What is the process of perceiving individual words in speech typically achieved through contextual cues?

The process of perceiving individual words in speech through contextual cues is best described by semantic segmentation. This concept involves understanding the meaning of words within the context in which they are spoken, allowing listeners to identify boundaries between words even in continuous speech. Humans often encounter speech that lacks clear pauses between words, making it difficult to discern where one word ends and another begins. By leveraging contextual cues—such as the surrounding words and their meanings—listeners can segment spoken language into recognizable units effectively.

While statistical regularities refer to the probabilities of certain sounds or sequences occurring together, they do not specifically address the perceptual process of recognizing individual words in speech. Articulatory suppression involves preventing speech production, which can interfere with cognitive processes related to language but is not about word perception itself. Syntactic priming deals with the influence of previously encountered sentence structures on later language processing and does not directly relate to word segmentation in speech.