Effects of lexical status within phonetic categories.

Abstract

Previous work has shown an interaction between lexical knowledge and phonetic categorization. For example, Ganong (1980) showed that ambiguous initial phonemes were identified so that the resulting syllable was a word. While previous studies have emphasized lexical influences at the phonetic category boundary and their time‐course, the present work examines lexical influence effects within categories. Changes in within category discrimination for word and nonword tokens were examined with an ABX discrimination paradigms. Signal detection analysis was employed to determine whether changes in rating responses within a phonetic category were attributable to changes in sensitivity, bias, or both. While changes in identification and discrimination between phonetic categories may be attributable to postperceptual biases, changes within categories may not be. Results will be discussed in regard to their impact on theories of word recognition and whether lexical influences are prelexical, postlexical, or both.