Direction of priming and phonetic prototypicality in VOT specificity effects

While previous studies have observed that the specificity effect of voice-onset time (VOT) is mediated by VOT length [1], the role of the direction of mismatch at prime versus test has not been directly explored. This study addresses this issue through a long-term repetition priming experiment that simultaneously manipulated both VOT length at test (unmodified vs. reduced) and the VOT match status (matched vs. mismatched). The results show that having an unmodified VOT and matching the VOT of the study prime were both significantly correlated with shorter reaction times at test, though unmodified VOTs were identified faster overall regardless of match status. These findings corroborate the importance of the role played by fine-grained phonetic information in word representations, and we argue that the dominance of VOT length can be explained if the malleability of word-level representations depends on the density of speech experiences across the phonetic space.