Gradient effects of within-category phonetic variation on lexical access
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Updated: Sep 28, 2026

Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology
Published on: June 29, 2021
Bob McMurray1, Michael K Tanenhaus, Richard N Aslin
1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA. mcmurray@bcs.rochester.edu
Abstract:
In order to determine whether small within-category differences in voice onset time (VOT) affect lexical access, eye movements were monitored as participants indicated which of four pictures was named by spoken stimuli that varied along a 0-40 ms VOT continuum. Within-category differences in VOT resulted in gradient increases in fixations to cross-boundary lexical competitors as VOT approached the category boundary. Thus, fine-grained acoustic/phonetic differences are preserved in patterns of lexical activation for competing lexical candidates and could be used to maximize the efficiency of on-line word recognition.
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