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. 2008 Dec;34(6):1609-31.
doi: 10.1037/a0011747.

Gradient sensitivity to within-category variation in words and syllables

Bob McMurray  1 , Richard N Aslin, Michael K Tanenhaus, Michael J Spivey, Dana Subik
Affiliations

Gradient sensitivity to within-category variation in words and syllables

Bob McMurray et al. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2008 Dec.

Abstract

Five experiments monitored eye movements in phoneme and lexical identification tasks to examine the effect of within-category subphonetic variation on the perception of stop consonants. Experiment 1 demonstrated gradient effects along voice-onset time (VOT) continua made from natural speech, replicating results with synthetic speech (B. McMurray, M. K. Tanenhaus, & R. N. Aslin, 2002). Experiments 2-5 used synthetic VOT continua to examine effects of response alternatives (2 vs. 4), task (lexical vs. phoneme decision), and type of token (word vs. consonant-vowel). A gradient effect of VOT in at least one half of the continuum was observed in all conditions. These results suggest that during online spoken word recognition, lexical competitors are activated in proportion to their continuous distance from a category boundary. This gradient processing may allow listeners to anticipate upcoming acoustic-phonetic information in the speech signal and dynamically compensate for acoustic variability.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Identification functions obtained from mouse responses in Experiment 1. Shown are the proportion of tokens labeled as /p/ as a function of VOT. Note the variability in category boundaries between continua.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Proportion of fixations to the competitor as a function of VOT for voiced (left series) and voiceless (right series) tokens. rVOT’s were grouped into 5-ms bins (equivalent to the grouping performed in the second ANOVA). Error bars reflect SEM.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Percentage of trials in which /p/ was selected in Experiment 2 and in McMurray et al (2002). A clear difference in the slope of the function can be seen.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Proportion of fixations to the competitor as a function of rVOT for voiced (left series) and voiceless (right series) tokens in Experiment 2. Error bars reflect SEM.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Percentage of trials in which /p/ was selected as a function of VOT. Experiment 3 is contrasted with Experiment 2. The category boundaries are very similar, but the slope for Experiment 3 was quite a bit steeper than Experiment 2.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Proportion of fixations to the competitor as a function of rVOT in Experiment 3. Error bars reflect SEM.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Percentage of trials in which /p/ was selected as a function of VOT and experiment for three 4AFC tasks. Experiment 4 (4AFC phoneme decision on lexical stimuli) is contrasted with Experiment 3 (4AFC phoneme decision on CV stimuli).
Figure 8
Figure 8
Probability of fixating the competitor as a function of rVOT in Experiment 4. Error bars reflect SEM.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Proportion of trials identified as /p/ as a function of VOT for Experiment 2 (2AFC phoneme ID) and Experiment 5 (2AFC lexical ID).
Figure 10
Figure 10
Probability of fixating the competitor as a function of rVOT in Experiment 5. Error bars reflect SEM.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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