Competition among variant word forms in spoken word recognition.

Abstract

Words in casual speech exhibit considerable variation in articulation. For example, alveolar stop consonants (/t/ and /d/) in certain phonetic environments may be realized as taps, glottal stops, careful /t/s and /d/s, or they may be deleted altogether. Thus, words containing non-word-initial alveolar stops may be represented in memory as multiple specific variants. Whether these multiple representations of variant forms compete for recognition, and at what level of representation such competition might occur, was investigated. Processing time was measured for monosyllabic words ending in either alveolar or non-alveolar (bilabial or velar) stops. Alveolar-ending words were responded to more slowly than carefully matched non-alveolar ending words in both lexical decision and same-different matching tasks. This result did not hold for similarly composed nonwords. In a follow-up experiment, the proportion of alveolar-ending neighbors in a word’s phonological neighborhood was manipulated. Overall, the results suggest that variant word forms compete at a stage beyond sublexical processing. Implications for characterizing competition in spoken word recognition are discussed.