title: Processing variant forms in spoken word recognition: the role of variant frequency.
abstract: Recognition of a spoken word phonological variant--schwa vowel deletion (e.g., corporate --> corp'rate)--was investigated in vowel detection (absent/present) and syllable number judgment (two or three syllables) tasks. Variant frequency corpus analyses (Patterson, LoCasto, & Connine, 2003) were used to select words with either high or low schwa vowel deletion rates. Speech continua were created for each word in which schwa vowel length was manipulated (unambiguous schwa-present and schwa-absent endpoints, along with intermediate ambiguous tokens). Matched control nonwords were created with identical schwa vowel continua and surrounding segments. The low-deletion-rate words showed more three-syllable judgments than did the high-deletion-rate words. Matched control nonwords did not differ as a function of deletion rate. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a lexical decision reaction time advantage for more frequent surface forms, as compared with infrequent ones, for schwa-deleted (Experiment 2) and schwa-present (Experiment 3) stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of representations of variant forms of words based on variant frequency.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York 13901, USA. connine@binghamton.edu
authors.forename: Cynthia M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Connine
authors.forename: Larissa J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Ranbom
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Patterson
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary