Biomaterial Database

Gradient effects of within-category phonetic variation on lexical access. 2002

Bob McMurray, and Michael K Tanenhaus, and Richard N Aslin

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA. mcmurray@bcs.rochester.edu

In order to determine whether small within-category differences in voice onset time (VOT) affect lexical access, eye movements were monitored as participants indicated which of four pictures was named by spoken stimuli that varied along a 0-40 ms VOT continuum. Within-category differences in VOT resulted in gradient increases in fixations to cross-boundary lexical competitors as VOT approached the category boundary. Thus, fine-grained acoustic/phonetic differences are preserved in patterns of lexical activation for competing lexical candidates and could be used to maximize the efficiency of on-line word recognition.

UI	MeSH Term	Description	Entries
D010700	Phonetics	The science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed)	Speech Sounds,Sound, Speech,Sounds, Speech,Speech Sound
D005133	Eye Movements	Voluntary or reflex-controlled movements of the eye.	Eye Movement,Movement, Eye,Movements, Eye
D006801	Humans	Members of the species Homo sapiens.	Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D013061	Speech Acoustics	The acoustic aspects of speech in terms of frequency, intensity, and time.	Acoustics, Speech,Acoustic, Speech,Speech Acoustic
D013067	Speech Perception	The process whereby an utterance is decoded into a representation in terms of linguistic units (sequences of phonetic segments which combine to form lexical and grammatical morphemes).	Speech Discrimination,Discrimination, Speech,Perception, Speech
D014825	Vocabulary	The sum or the stock of words used by a language, a group, or an individual. (From Webster, 3d ed)	Vocabularies
D021641	Recognition, Psychology	The knowledge or perception that someone or something present has been previously encountered.	Familiarity,Psychological Recognition,Recognition (Psychology),Psychology Recognition,Recognition, Psychological