Contextual influences on the internal structure of phonetic categories: a distinction between lexical status and speaking rate.
Previous research has shown that phonetic categories have a graded internal structure that is highly dependent on acoustic-phonetic contextual factors, such as speaking rate; these factors alter not only the location of phonetic category boundaries, but also the location of a category's best exemplars. The purpose of the present investigation, which focused on the voiceless category as specified by voice onset time (VOT), was to determine whether a higher order linguistic contextual factor, lexical status, which is known to alter the location of the voiced-voiceless phonetic category boundary, also alters the location of the best exemplars of the voiceless category. The results indicated that lexical status has a more limited and qualitatively different effect on the category's best exemplars than does the acoustic-phonetic factor of speaking rate. This dissociation is discussed in terms of a production-based account in which perceived best exemplars of a category track contextual variation in speech production.
Allen
J S
JS
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. jlmiller@neu.edu
Miller
J L
JL
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement