Publication Date

7-10-2017

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volume

142

Issue

1

DOI

10.1121/1.4986422

Abstract

This study reports differential category retuning effect between [i] and [u]. Two groups of American listeners were exposed to ambiguous vowels ([i/u]) within words that index a phoneme /i/ (e.g., athl[i/u]t) (i-group) or /u/ (e.g., aftern[i/u]n) (u-group). Before and after the exposure these listeners categorized sounds from a [bip]-[bup] continuum. The i-group significantly increased /bip/ responses after exposure, but the u-group did not change their responses significantly. These results suggest that the way mental representation handles phonetic variation may influence malleability of each category, highlighting the complex relationship among distribution of sounds, their mental representation, and speech perception.

Comments

This is the Version of Record and can also be read online here.

Department

Linguistics and Language Development

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