“Stability” of vowel categories is grounded in phonology: Evidence from English dialect comparison

2 ABSTRACT Current models of speech perception emphasize either fine-grained acoustic properties or coarse-grained abstract characteristics of speech sounds. Here, we provide evidence for the view that vowel categories are grounded in abstract phonological representation and that these representations account for the successful access of the corresponding categories. In an auditory semantic priming experiment, American English listeners made lexical decision on targets (e.g. pot) preceded by semantically related primes (e.g. pan). A variation of the prime’'s vowel across categories (e.g. pen) was not tolerated, as assessed by a lack of priming, although the phonetic categories of the two different vowels considerably overlap. Compared to the outcome of the same experiment with New Zealand English listeners, where prime variations were tolerated, our experiment supports the view that phonological, but not phonetic representations guide the mapping process from the acoustic signal to an abstract mental representation.