Contextual influences on the internal structure of phonetic categories: A distinction between lexical status and speaking rate

Abstract

Previous research has shown that phonetic categories have a graded internal structure that is highly dependent on acoustic-phonetic contextual factors, such as speaking rate; these factors alter not only the location of phonetic category boundaries, but also the location of a category' s best exemplars. The purpose of the present investigation, which focused on the voiceless category as specified by voice onset time (VOT), was to determine whether a higher order linguistic contextual factor, lexical status, which is known to alter the location of the voiced-voiceless phonetic category boundary, also alters the location of the best exemplars of the voiceless category. The results indicated that lexical status has a more limited and qualitatively different effect on the category' s best exemplars than does the acousticphonetic factor of speaking rate. This dissociation is discussed in terms of a production-based account in which perceived best exemplars of a category track contextual variation in speech production.

Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

“…That is, the effect of the preceding context was larger in the cases of more ambiguous signals-the intermediate conditions of our Coda Signal series-than in cases of clear signals-the endpoints of our Coda-Signal series. This mirrors other findings on context effects in speech perception, which have also shown maximal context effects for ambiguous signals (Allen & Miller, 2001;Gow, 2003;Fowler et al, 2000;Liberman, 1996;Lotto & Kluender, 1998;Mann, 1980;Massaro & Cohen, 1983;Nittrouer & StuddertKennedy, 1987;Sinnott & Saporita, 2000).…”

“…The same fricative noise is more likely to be perceived as an /s/ in the form /krIsm>/+fricative, in line with the word 'christmas', than in the form /fulI/+ fricative, which becomes the word 'foolish' if the fricative is interpreted as /P/ (see, e.g., McQueen, 1996, for a review). Such lexical context effects are, however, not mandatory (McQueen, 1991) and seem to have less of an impact on phonetic perception than phonetic context effects (Allen & Miller, 2001).…”

A temporally dynamic context effect that disrupts voice onset time discrimination of rapidly successive stimuli

“…None of the previously reported contextual effects (Allen & Miller, 2001;Diehl, Elman, & McCusker, 1978;Eimas & Corbit, 1973;Iverson & Kuhl, 2000; have been examined in terms of their temporal dynamics. Indeed, only some mathematical models of speech perception have tried to address changes in performance due to changes in ISI (e.g., Macmillan, Goldberg, & Braida, 1988;Schouten & van Hessen, 1992).…”

“…A variety of context effects have been reported in the speech perception literature, such as adaptation effects (Eimas & Corbit, 1973), lexical effects (Allen & Miller, 2001), contrast effects (Diehl, Elman, & McCusker, 1978), and order effects (Lotto, Kluender, & Holt, 1998). Perhaps the best known is the perceptual magnet effect (Iverson & Kuhl, 1996;Kuhl, 1991Kuhl, , 1994, whose interpretation remains controversial (e.g., Lotto, Kluender, & Holt, 1998).…”

Speaking rate from proximal and distal contexts is used during word segmentation.

“…Listeners take this into account and interpret durational cues relative to rate information in the surrounding context (see Miller, 1981Miller, , 1987 for overviews). The effect of rate, that is, the effect of a linear manipulation of the acoustic duration of segments adjacent to a target segment, has been investigated extensively in the domain of phoneme perception (e.g., Allen & Miller, 2001;Miller, 1981;1987;Miller & Dexter, 1988;Miller & Liberman, 1979;Miller & Wayland, 1993). Recently, it has also been demonstrated that rate modulates perception of duration as a suprasegmental lexical-stress cue (Reinisch, Jesse, & McQueen, in press).…”