Phonetic retuning to idiosyncrasies in word onsets: The interplay of lexical context and prediction

Listeners can use both lexical context (i.e., lexical knowledge activated by the word itself) and lexical predictions based on the content of a preceding sentence to adjust their phonetic categories to speaker idiosyncrasies. However, this phonetic retuning is difficult for listeners to achieve using lexical context when adjusting to idiosyncrasies in word onsets. In this situation, sentence context could help by boosting lexical knowledge. In a series of experiments, we tested for the interplay between lexical context and sentence context. Using the sentence-guided retuning paradigm from Jesse (2021), either a preceding sentence context or following lexical context disambiguated the perceptually ambiguous onset of short words as /s/ or /f/. At test, listeners categorized steps from an /sɑ/-/fɑ/ continuum. Evidence for phonetic retuning, in terms of more responses at test in line with prior disambiguation during exposure, was found when sentence context had disambiguated the critical sound during exposure. In contrast, lexical knowledge activated by the word itself only produced trends across a subset of steps. When sentence and lexical context disambiguated the idiosyncrasy in the same words, the change of the overall retuning effect across steps followed the pattern observed in the experiment with only lexical disambiguation. Furthermore, this modulation of the retuning effect was not observed when sentence and lexical context disambiguated the idiosyncrasy in different items. This pattern of results suggests an interplay between these two types of contexts. Sentence context therefore helps with retuning to talker idiosyncrasies in word onsets when the lexical context can fail listeners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).