Phonetic categorization in phonological lexical neighborhoods: Facilitatory and inhibitory effects

TL;DR

This study shows that phonetic processing is influenced by both facilitatory and inhibitory effects from phonological lexical neighborhoods.

Contribution

The paper introduces evidence for concurrent facilitatory and inhibitory effects of lexical neighborhoods on phonetic processing.

Findings

Target words show facilitatory lexical influences in phonetic categorization.

Rhyme neighbors inhibit phonetic categorization in acoustic continua.

Sublexical phonetic processing is affected by multiple lexical forces.

Abstract

Phonetic processing, whereby the bottom-up speech signal is translated into higher-level phonological representations such as phonemes, has been demonstrated to be influenced by phonological lexical neighborhoods. Previous studies show facilitatory effects of lexicality and phonological neighborhood density on phonetic categorization. However, given the evidence for lexical competition in spoken word recognition, we hypothesize that there are concurrent facilitatory and inhibitory effects of phonological lexical neighborhoods on phonetic processing. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants categorized the onset phoneme in word-nonword and nonword-word acoustic continua. The results show that the target word of the continuum exhibits facilitatory lexical influences whereas rhyme neighbors inhibit phonetic categorization. The results support the hypothesis that sublexical phonetic processing is affected by multiple facilitatory and inhibitory lexical forces in the processing stream.

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