Examining the Lexical Effect on Categorical Perception of Stops in Taiwan Southern Min

The goal of this study is to examine if there is a word superiority effect on perception of three-way contrast of stops in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM). Based on Ganong’s (1980) findings that English participants showed a significant lexical effect in phonetic perception, I hypothesize that there exists a difference in perception between real words and nonwords in TSM. The prediction is that the categorical boundary shifts as lexical status plays a role in perception of stops. Experiment 1 was conducted as a neutral set of perception of TSM bilabial stops b-p-p h . In experiment 2, cases of “nonword-word-nonword” set along the b-p-p h continuum were conducted. Results showed that real words corresponded to a wider range of VOT in the continuum compared to the neutral pattern. The categorical boundaries (both between /b/ and /p/ and between /p/ and /p h /) were found to shift away from the real word sides towards the nonword sides. The lexical effect may be explained by parallel processing in which a higher level of processing (lexical level) interacts with a lower level (phonemic level) in speech perception.