Frequent or contextually predictable words are often phonetically reduced, i.e. shortened and produced with articulatory undershoot. Explanations for phonetic reduction of predictable forms tend to take one of two approaches: Intelligibility-based accounts hold that talkers maximize intelligibility of words that might otherwise be difficult to…

The processes and the cues determining the orthographic structure of polysyllabic words remain far from clear. In the present study, we investigated the role of letter category (consonant vs. vowels) in the perceptual organization of letter strings. In the syllabic counting task, participants were presented with written words matched for the…

Much research has explored the extent to which statistical computations account for the extraction of linguistic information. However, it remains to be studied how language-specific constraints are imposed over these computations. In the present study we investigated if the violation of a word-forming rule in Catalan (the presence of more than one…

Phonology provides a system by which a limited number of types of phonetic variation can signal communicative intentions at multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Because phonologies vary from language to language, acquiring the phonology of a language demands learning to attribute phonetic variation appropriately. Here, we studied the case of…

Infants become selectively sensitive to phonological distinctions relevant to their native language at an early age. One might expect that infants bring some of this phonological knowledge to bear in encoding the words they subsequently acquire. In line with this expectation, studies have found that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations…

The role of segment similarity in early (i.e., partially learned) lexical entries was assessed using artificial lexicons in a referential context. During a learning phase participants heard 40 nonsense words, each accompanied by an unfamiliar picture. In testing, participants heard the direction ''Click on the [X]'', and chose which of four…

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…

Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name ("pencil," given target "panda") than on less confusable distractors…