THE EFFECT OF SUBPHONETIC DIFFERENCES ON LEXICAL ACCESS

This study investigated whether lexical access is affected by inherent acoustic variations that contribute to the identity of a phonetic fea ture and ultimately a phonetic segment. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the magnitude of semantic (associative) priming in a lexical decision task is influenced when the acoustic manifestati on of the initial voiceless stop consonant (specifically, voice onset time) of a prime word semantically related to a lexical decision targe t was systematically manipulated (e.g., prime: ''king''; target: ''que en''). Results showed no effect of the acoustic manipulations at the l onger interstimulus interval (250 ms): however, at the shorter interst imulus interval (50 ms), the magnitude of semantic facilitation decrea sed as a function of the voice onset time manipulations. In addition, there was a tendency toward slower lexical decision latencies when the prime word had a real word voiced counterpart than when it did not. T hese results suggest that activation levels of words in the lexicon ar e graded, depending on the subphonetic shape of the input word. Result s also suggest that words which are phonologically similar to the inte nded word candidate are activated to some extent, whether the input pr ovides a relatively poor phonetic representation of the intended word or a good one.