Representational specificity of within-category phonetic variation in the mental lexicon

Abstract

This study examines whether within-category variation in voice onset time (VOT) is encoded in long-term memory and affects subsequent word recognition, and whether these effects are modulated by the degree of lexical discriminability. Four long-term repetition-priming experiments were conducted using words containing word-initial voiceless stops varying in VOT. The magnitude of priming was compared between same and different VOT conditions in words with voiced counterparts (pat/bat) and words without voiced counterparts (cow/*gow), and in words with high-frequency counterparts (clue/glue) and words with low-frequency counterparts (cab/gab). If veridical representations of each episode are preserved in memory, variation in VOT should have demonstrable effects on the magnitude of priming. However, if within-category variation is discarded and form-based representations are abstract, variation in VOT should not mediate priming. Further, if lexical discriminability modulates the degree of encoding of within-category variation, words with counterparts and words with high-frequency counterparts should show larger specificity effects than words without counterparts and words with low-frequency counterparts. Implications of these results for the specificity and abstractness of phonetic representations in long-term memory will be discussed.