I don't see why they can't both be important signals. I would hazard a guess that a combined approach is what humans do.
I'm not a linguist or anything, but it seems like in practice people may pronounce "peanut butter" a little differently when they say the two words together. Something like "peanubutter". Or maybe they convert the "t" in "peanut" into a glottal stop.
Anyway, if the "t" is absent when you're talking about peanut butter but present when you're talking about two separate items, I don't see why you shouldn't feel free to use that signal. But I also don't see why you shouldn't use probabilities as well.
I agree. When parsing speech, we humans listen for many cues all at once. Spoken language even has intentional redundancy so we can identify and disregard inconsistent cues. For example, a child or foreign speaker might replace "peanut" with "peanuts" and most people would still have no problem understanding "peanuts butter" as long as the rest of the cues are consistent.
They are both signals. But the prior probability is more important in this case because it is so much more common to say "peanut butter" than "peanut, butter". In other cases the pause might be a more important signal.
I'm not a linguist or anything, but it seems like in practice people may pronounce "peanut butter" a little differently when they say the two words together. Something like "peanubutter". Or maybe they convert the "t" in "peanut" into a glottal stop.
Anyway, if the "t" is absent when you're talking about peanut butter but present when you're talking about two separate items, I don't see why you shouldn't feel free to use that signal. But I also don't see why you shouldn't use probabilities as well.