On prototypes and phonetic categories: a critical assessment of the perceptual magnet effect in speech perception.
According to P. K. Kuhl (1991), a perceptual magnet effect occurs when discrimination accuracy is lower among better instances of a phonetic category than among poorer instances. Three experiments examined the perceptual magnet effect for the vowel /i/. In Experiment 1, participants rated some examples of /i/ as better instances of the category than others. In Experiment 2, no perceptual magnet effect was observed with materials based on Kuhl's tokens of /i/ or with items normed for each participant. In Experiment 3, participants labeled the vowels developed from Kuhl's test set. Many of the vowels in the nonprototype /i/ condition were not categorized as /i/s. This finding suggests that the comparisons obtained in Kuhl's original study spanned different phonetic categories.
Lively
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Ameritech, Hoffman Estates, Illinois 60196, USA. scott.e.lively@ameritech.com
Pisoni
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DB
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003463:Cues; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D011582:Psychological Theory; D013067:Speech Perception