Introduction: The gating task demonstrates the effect of context on spoken
word recognition. You will hear increasingly longer fragments of a word, either
in a sentence or on its own. You should try to recognize what the gated word is.
Then choose a value on the rating scale for how confident you were with your identification
of the word. You will find that you are quicker to recognize the gated word when
it is in a sentence compared to when it is in isolation. You will also find that
you are quicker to recognize a gated word late in a sentence, especially a long
sentence, because the grammar and meaning of the early part of the sentence limit
the number of possible solutions. Lastly, you may notice that your confidence
ratings sometimes do not correspond to the point at which you correctly identified
the word. That is because the isolation point can be reached, whether or not you
are confident in your choice.