Nasal Coarticulation in Lexical Perception: The Role of Neighborhood-conditioned Variation

Nasal coarticulation has been shown to vary systematically in words depending on the number of phonological neighbors: words with many neighbors are produced with a greater degree of vowel nasality than words with fewer phonological neighbors [9]. This study examines the effect of this systematic low-level variation on lexical perception. The degree of nasality in natural real and nonsense words from high and low density neighborhoods was manipulated to neutralize the neighborhood-conditioned differences, and these original and manipulated stimuli were presented to subjects in a lexical decision task and a forced choice preference task. The findings of this study suggest that, for high neighborhood density words at least, listeners are indeed sensitive to this systematic low-level phonetic variation and that it has an influence on lexical perception.