Abstract
In previous studies of speech perception, Kuhl and colleagues have provided evidence that the category goodness of a vowel influences the perception of that particular vowel—the perceptual magnet effect. These data indicate that listeners demonstrate poor discrimination of vowel tokens when they are close to the prototype vowel but good discrimination when the vowel is close to a nonprototypic vowel. However, data will be provided from experiments conducted in this laboratory using an MDS paradigm on the /i/–/ɪ/ distinction that indicate this effect is eliminated or severely curtailed when all tokens are good exemplars of the /i/ category (>75%) and the nonprototypic exemplars are not near a phoneme boundary. In addition, given the almost exclusive reliance in the literature on the /i/–/ɪ/ vowel pair, additional data will be provided on the magnet effect in the /u/–/ɲ/ and /ʌ/–/ɑ/. Similar to /i/, extreme tokens of both /ɑ/ and /u/ that are distant from the prototype, but not in the direction of another vowel category (and thus near a phoneme boundary). The results will be discussed in terms of whether the effect is linguistic (phonetic) or auditory in nature.
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