Is Phonological Context Always Used to Recognize Variant Forms in Spoken Word Recognition? The Role of Variant Frequency and Context Distribution

Several mechanisms have been proposed to account for how listeners accommodate regular phonological variation in connected speech. Using a corpus analysis and 5 cross-modal priming experiments, the authors investigate phonological variant recognition for the American English word-final flap. The cor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2009-08, Vol.35 (4), p.1205-1220
Main Authors: Ranbom, Larissa J, Connine, Cynthia M, Yudman, Elana M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Audition
Biological and medical sciences
Citations
Experimental psychology
Experiments
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Language
Language Role
Lexical processing
Listeners
New York
North American English
Oral Communication
Perception
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemics
Phonetics
Phonology
Priming
Production and perception of spoken language
Psycholinguistics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Recognition
Speech
Speech Perception
Spoken words
Standard Spoken Usage
Variants
Word Recognition
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Summary:Several mechanisms have been proposed to account for how listeners accommodate regular phonological variation in connected speech. Using a corpus analysis and 5 cross-modal priming experiments, the authors investigate phonological variant recognition for the American English word-final flap. The corpus analysis showed that the flap variant occurs relatively frequently compared with the citation form [t] variant and is only probabilistically constrained by prosodic and phonemic context. The experienced distribution of the flap production is reflected in lexical processing: 4 cross-modal priming experiments demonstrated that lexical activation is not influenced by contextual constraints (inappropriate phrase boundary or phonemic contexts). A 2nd finding was a smaller priming effect for the less frequent flap as compared with the more frequent [t] variant. The contrasts between these findings for the flap and other context conditioned variants are discussed in terms of their implications for models of phonological variation recognition and in terms of the role of language experience.
ISSN:0096-1523
1939-1277
DOI:10.1037/a0015022