ON PROTOTYPES AND PHONETIC CATEGORIES - A CRITICAL-ASSESSMENT OF THE PERCEPTUAL MAGNET EFFECT IN SPEECH-PERCEPTION

According to P. K. Kuhl (1991), a perceptual magnet effect occurs when discrimination accuracy is lower among better instances of a phonetic category than among poorer instances. Three experiments examined the perceptual magnet effect for the vowel /i/. In Experiment 1, participa nts rated some examples of /i/ as better instances of the category tha n others. In Experiment 2, no perceptual magnet effect was observed wi th materials based on Kuhl's tokens of /i/ or with items normed for ea ch participant. In Experiment 3, participants labeled the vowels devel oped from Kuhl's test set. Many of the vowels in the nonprototype /i/ condition were not categorized as /i/s. This finding suggests that the comparisons obtained in Kuhl's original study spanned different phone tic categories.