The effect of voice onset time differences on lexical access in Dutch.
Effects on spoken-word recognition of prevoicing differences in Dutch initial voiced plosives were examined. In 2 cross-modal identity-priming experiments, participants heard prime words and nonwords beginning with voiced plosives with 12, 6, or 0 periods of prevoicing or matched items beginning with voiceless plosives and made lexical decisions to visual tokens of those items. Six-period primes had the same effect as 12-period primes. Zero-period primes had a different effect, but only when their voiceless counterparts were real words. Listeners could nevertheless discriminate the 6-period primes from the 12- and 0-period primes. Phonetic detail appears to influence lexical access only to the extent that it is useful: In Dutch, presence versus absence of prevoicing is more informative than amount of prevoicing.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands. p.m.vanalphen@uva.nl
Petra M
PM
van Alphen
James M
JM
McQueen
D001288:Attention; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception