Gradient effects of within-category phonetic variation on lexical access.
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.
McMurray
Bob
B
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA. mcmurray@bcs.rochester.edu
Tanenhaus
Michael K
MK
Aslin
Richard N
RN
D005133:Eye Movements; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary