title: Phonological Neighborhood Competition Affects Spoken Word Production Irrespective of Sentential Context.
abstract: Two experiments examined the influence of phonologically similar neighbors on articulation of words' initial stop consonants in order to investigate the conditions under whichlexically-conditioned phonetic variationarises. In Experiment 1, participants produced words in isolation. Results showed that the voice-onset time (VOT) of a target's initial voiceless stop was predicted by its overall neighborhood density, but not by its having a voicing minimal pair. In Experiment 2, participants read aloud the same targets after semantically predictive sentence contexts and after neutral sentence contexts. Results showed that, although VOTs were shorter in words produced after predictive contexts, the neighborhood density effect on VOT production persisted irrespective of context. These findings suggest that global competition from a word's neighborhood affects spoken word production independently of contextual modulation and support models in which activation cascades automatically and obligatorily among all of a selected target word's phonological neighbors during acoustic-phonetic encoding.
authors.affiliation: Brown University, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences; Box 1821; Providence, RI, USA 02912.
authors.forename: Neal P
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: Fox
authors.affiliation: Brown University, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences; Box 1821; Providence, RI, USA 02912.
authors.forename: Megan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Reilly
authors.affiliation: Brown University, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences; Box 1821; Providence, RI, USA 02912 ; Brown University, Brown Institute for Brain Science; Box 1953; Providence, RI, USA 02912.
authors.forename: Sheila E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Blumstein
keywords: hyperarticulation; neighborhood density; phonological competition; sentence context; speech production; voice-onset time (VOT)