Tests of the perceptual magnet effect for American English /r/ and /l/

Experiments by Kuhl and her colleagues have suggested that the perceptual organization of vowel categories is strongly influenced by category goodness. Using a variety of techniques, including signal detection analysis and multidimensional scaling, a perceptual magnet effect for vowels characterized by poor sensitivity and perceptual clustering near the best exemplars of a category and by good discrimination and stretched perceptual distances near the worst exemplars has been demonstrated. The present experiments extend these findings to American English /r/ and /l/. Sixteen variants of /r/ and /l/ were synthesized by independently changing F2 and F3. Adults gave similarity ratings on a seven‐point scale for pairs of these tokens. Multidimensional scaling analyses demonstrated that the perceptual space was shrunk in the F2 and F3 dimensions near the best exemplars of /r/ and /l/, and that the perceptual space was stretched in both dimensions near poor exemplars. This suggests that the perceptual magnet ef...