Abstract
When part of an utterance is deleted and replaced by an extraneous noise, listeners typically report that the utterance sounded intact; they appear to restore the deleted phoneme. The present study investigated whether this illusion differs when only one word can legally be restored (e.g., when the “l” in “lesion” is replaced), versus when more than one (restored) phoneme will create an English word (e.g., when the “l” in “legion” is replaced). The data suggest that listeners are sensitive to this manipulation. Signal‐detection analyses of the data indicate that this “lexical uniqueness” affects both true perceptual restoration and the bias toward reporting utterances as intact. Control pseudowords, created by splicing together pieces of the test words, showed no effects of the lexical uniqueness of their components, supporting the lexical basis of the effects found with the words. The results are used to postulate a model of the word‐recognition process.
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