On the nature of vocalic representation during lexical access

Abstract

The current study explores vowel perception and its effects on lexical access by asking the following questions: (1) how does severity of mispronunciation in vowels affect listeners’ ability to recognize familiar words? (2) What is the appropriate metric for measuring severity of vowel mispronunciation? (3) How do vowel mispronunciations and consonant mispronunciations compare in effects on spoken word recognition? Forty-eight monolingual American English speaking adults were tested in an eye tracking task requiring listeners to look to either a referent of a familiar label or a novel referent with no known label when the vowel of the familiar label was altered along one, two, or three phonological dimensions. Results showed that participants were sensitive to changes in vowels; time course analyses showed earlier divergence for vowel mispronunciations than for consonant mispronunciations in previous studies. However, vowel mispronunciations had less effect on activation of target lexical items than had consonant mispronunciations. A continuous measure of psychophysical acoustic difference better predicted participants’ looking patterns than a discrete measure of phonological features (height, backness, and roundedness). Together, these results suggest that in American English, vowels condition lexical access less strongly than consonants, perhaps due in part to their more continuous perception.