Gradient sensitivity to acoustic detail and temporal integration of phonetic cues

Speech contains systematic covariation at the subphonemic level that could be used to integrate information over time (McMurray et al., 2003; Gow, 2001). Previous research has established sensitivity to this variation: activation for lexical competitors is sensitive to within‐category variation in voice‐onset‐time (McMurray et al., 2002). This study extends this investigation to other subphonemic speech cues by examining formant transitions (r/l and d/g), formant slope (b/w) and VOT (b/p) in an eye‐tracking paradigm similar to McMurray et al. (2002). Vowel length was also varied to examine temporal organization (e.g., VOT precedes the vowel). Subjects heard a token from each continua and selected the target from a screen containing pictures of the target, competitor and unrelated items. Fixations to the competitor increased with distance from the boundary along each of the speech continua. Unlike prior work, there was also an effect on fixations to the target. There was no effect of vowel length on the d/...