Another basic experiment compared recognition of naturally spoken words within a phrase versus the same words in isolation, finding that perception accuracy usually drops in the latter condition. To probe the influence of semantic knowledge on perception, Garnes and Bond (1976) similarly used carrier sentences where target words only differed in a single phoneme (bay/day/gay, for example) whose quality changed along a continuum. When put into different sentences that each naturally led to one interpretation, listeners tended to judge ambiguous words according to the meaning of the whole sentence
