Phonological and auditory context effects in the perception of synthetic liquid-plus-stop clusters

Abstract

In experiments with English synthetic stops in the /VCCV/ disyllables /arga, alga, arda, alda/, listeners give more /‐da/ responses after /ar‐/ syllables [see, e.g., A. Lotto and K. Kluender, Percept. Psychophys. 60, 602–619 (1998)]. The importance of general auditory contrast compared to more specific phonetic mechanisms is a key issue in the literature. In three experiments that used factorially crossed F3 continua for both the liquid /r-l/ and for the stop /g-d/, we recorded responses to all four disyllables (4 alternative forced choice). Experiments 1 and 2 both showed that categorizing the liquid as /r/ biases stop responses toward /d/. However, Experiment 1, which involved a 4-step extreme-/r/ to extreme-/l/ continuum, showed effects consistent with auditory contrast of the F3 values across the stop. Experiment 2 focused on the ambiguous region of the /l-r/ continuum [sampled in 7 steps]. While a clear effect of the [-rd-] phonological bias remained, there was little reliable evidence of contrast effects in F3 across the stop gap. Here, we report analyses of a new larger (n > 60) Experiment 3 with more stimuli (70 compared to less than 50 each) that subsumes the ranges of the previous two experiments. We evaluate the hypothesis (among others) that the auditory-contrast-like effect is confined largely to stimuli with relatively low F3 at the offset of the /VC-/ syllable.