Introduction

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Experiment 3

General discussion

Conclusion

References

Abstract

What are the phonological representations that listeners use to map information about the segmental content of speech onto the mental lexicon during spoken-word recognition? Recent evidence from perceptual-learning paradigms seems to support (context-dependent) allophones as the basic representational units in spoken-word recognition. But recent evidence from a selective-adaptation paradigm seems to suggest that context-independent phonemes also play a role. We present three experiments using selective adaptation that constitute strong tests of these representational hypotheses. In Experiment 1, we tested generalization of selective adaptation using different allophones of Dutch /r/ and /l/ – a case where generalization has not been found with perceptual learning. In Experiments 2 and 3, we tested generalization of selective adaptation using German back fricatives in which allophonic and phonemic identity were varied orthogonally. In all three experiments, selective adaptation was observed only if adaptors and test stimuli shared allophones. Phonemic identity, in contrast, was neither necessary nor sufficient for generalization of selective adaptation to occur. These findings and other recent data using the perceptual-learning paradigm suggest that pre-lexical processing during spoken-word recognition is based on allophones, and not on context-independent phonemes.

Introduction

One of the fundamental questions in cognitive science regards the nature of the mental representations that underlie cognitive functioning. In spoken-word recognition, the question is which code we use to map the highly variable speech signal onto knowledge stored in the mental lexicon – knowledge about the phonological form of words. What, in short, are the pre-lexical units of speech perception? Theories answer this question in many different ways. Some theories claim that there are no phonologically abstract prelexical representations (Goldinger, 1998) and others that there are, but disagree about the grain-size of the units, which could be abstract phonological features (Lahiri & Reetz, 2010), contextdependent allophones (Luce, Goldinger, Auer, & Vitevitch, 2000), context-independent phonemes (McClelland & Elman, 1986; Norris, 1994), or syllables (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981), or could be a combination of units of different size (Wickelgren, 1969). One recurring issue in this long-running debate has been that evidence in favour of one or the other type of unit often turned out to be paradigm-specific. Evidence for many different units can therefore be found (for a review, see Goldinger & Azuma, 2003).