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Abstract
Different pronunciation variants of the same word can facilitate lexical access, but they may be more or less effective primes depending on their phonological form, stylistic appropriateness, familiarity, and social prestige, suggesting that multiple phonological variants are encoded in the lexicon with varying strength. The current study investigated how subphonemic variation is encoded using a lexical decision task with cross-modal form priming. The results revealed that the magnitude of priming was mediated by stylistic and social properties of the auditory primes, including speaking style, talker dialect, and duration. These interactions provide evidence that phonetically reduced forms and forms that are not socially prestigious are not as robustly encoded in the lexicon as canonical forms and forms produced in prestigious varieties.
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References
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- 1
An alternative interpretation of Ranbom and Connine’s (2007) results is that the different numbers of segments in the stimuli containing [nt] and [ɾ̃] variants led to the observed differences in lexical processing.
- 2
In the original corpus, two disyllabic word targets were used to balance the set of words for lexical frequency and neighborhood density. To maintain this balance, all 234 target words were used in the current study.
- 3
Hand dominance was not assessed because only correct word responses were analyzed. Any differences in response times to word responses as a function of hand dominance were captured by the random intercepts for participants in the statistical analysis (see the section “Statistical Analysis”).
- 4
Although other factors, including intrinsic vowel duration differences and phonetic context, could also play a role in vowel duration variation, these word-specific effects are captured by the random intercepts and trial type slopes for prime word.
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