Two experiments examined the influence of phonologically similar neighbors on articulation of words’ initial stop consonants in order to investigate the conditions under which lexically-conditioned phonetic variation arises. 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.

The acoustic dimensions that distinguish speech sounds (like the vowel differences in “boot” and “boat”) also differentiate speakers’ voices. Therefore, listeners must normalize across speakers without losing linguistic information. Past behavioral work suggests an important role for auditory contrast enhancement in normalization: preceding context affects listeners’ perception of subsequent speech sounds. Here, using intracranial electrocorticography in humans, we investigate whether and how such context effects arise in auditory cortex. Participants identified speech sounds that were preceded by phrases from two different speakers whose voices differed along the same acoustic dimension as target words (the lowest resonance of the vocal tract). In every participant, target vowels evoke a speaker-dependent neural response that is consistent with the listener’s perception, and which follows from a contrast enhancement model. Auditory cortex processing thus displays a critical feature of normalization, allowing listeners to extract meaningful content from the voices of diverse speakers.

Our findings suggest that high gamma activity is a reliable biomarker for perception evoked by both natural and electrical stimuli.