Effects of variation on processing of word-medial consonants

The present study investigates processing of variation in word-medial stops and the role of this variation in phoneme recognition. Variation in word-medial stops has been shown to influence lexical access but it is unclear whether this variation also affects recognition at the phoneme level [Tucker, J. Phon., 39, 312-318, (2011)]. A phoneme monitoring task is used to investigate the role of production variation in the identification of word-medial stop consonants. Following Warner & Tucker [J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 130, 1606-1617, (2012)], the stimuli comprise English nonwords with target consonants /b, p, d, t, g, k/ in an intervocalic post-stress position produced with a range of production variation. This variation was grouped into three sets including groups at each extremes and a group in the middle of the range. The acoustic characteristics of the stops, which reflect this variation (e.g. consonant duration and intensity difference) were extracted and used to model the reaction times collected during the phoneme monitoring experiment. The reaction times were statistically modeled using a linear mixed-effects regression. Models of spoken word recognition and models of lexical storage are used to interpret the results and the contribution of the results to our understanding of these models is discussed.