title: Gradient effects of within-category phonetic variation on lexical access.
abstract: In order to determine whether small within-category differences in voice onset time (VOT) affect lexical access, eye movements were monitored as participants indicated which of four pictures was named by spoken stimuli that varied along a 0-40 ms VOT continuum. Within-category differences in VOT resulted in gradient increases in fixations to cross-boundary lexical competitors as VOT approached the category boundary. Thus, fine-grained acoustic/phonetic differences are preserved in patterns of lexical activation for competing lexical candidates and could be used to maximize the efficiency of on-line word recognition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA. mcmurray@bcs.rochester.edu
authors.forename: Bob
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: McMurray
authors.forename: Michael K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Tanenhaus
authors.forename: Richard N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Aslin
mesh_terms: D005133:Eye Movements; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary