Event
Title: When Listeners Use Lexical Context to Recalibrate their Phonetic Categories Abstract: In
listening to speech, people have been shown to apply several types of
adjustment to their phonemic categories that take into account
variations in the prevailing linguistic environment. In
“lexically-driven recalibration”, listeners hear a number of words that
contain a slight mispronunciation. For example, a word like “mentorship”
might be presented with a pronunciation that is midway between
“mentorship” and “mentorsip”. After hearing such mispronunciations,
listeners adjust their phoneme boundaries, expanding the category so
that the formerly ambiguous sounds are now perceived as acceptable
tokens. Our lab has investigated several properties of the recalibration
phenomenon, including the durability of the change, its sensitivity to
higher-level cognitive information, its degree of automaticity, and the
processing time required for recalibration to take place. Collectively,
the studies clarify when listeners do and do not use lexical context to
retune their phonemic encoding processes, providing insights into the
spoken word recognition system.