Representational specificity of within-category phonetic variation in the long-term mental lexicon.
This study examines the potential encoding in long-term memory of subphonemic, within-category variation in voice onset time (VOT) and the degree to which this encoding of subtle variation is mediated by lexical competition. In 4 long-term repetition-priming experiments, magnitude of priming was examined as a function of variation in VOT in words with voiced counterparts (cape-gape) and without (cow-*gow) and words whose counterparts were high frequency (pest-best) or low frequency (pile-bile). The results showed that within-category variation was indeed encoded in memory and could have demonstrable effects on priming. However, there were also robust effects of prototypical representations on priming. Encoding of within-category variation was also affected by the presence of lexical counterparts and by the frequency of counterparts.
Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, PQ, Canada. c3440@er.uqam.ca
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D001288:Attention; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning