Find in Library

Phonological alternations are attested in many of the world’s languages. In production, these robustly generalize to new words and contexts, suggesting that talkers and listeners of a language have internalized them in some form. However, it is unclear whether listeners’ knowledge of phonological alternations is used during real-time spoken word recognition. The present study asks whether listeners use knowledge of phonological alternations to modulate activation of competitor forms during real-time word recognition. In two experiments, listeners learned an artificial language with phonological alternations. We then used eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm to assess real-time spoken word recognition. We examined fixations to competitors that would be a match to the input because of the learned phonological alternation. Results showed that listeners do use phonological alternations in real time. Given a [t] ~ [d] alternation and an auditory stimulus with a surface [d], listeners fixated the [t]-competitor more than one that could not alternate with [d]. They were even able to generalize this to words that had not been learned in their alternated form. However, not all alternations showed the same pattern; listeners did not use a [d] ~ [z] alternation in the same way. Implications for various models of word recognition are discussed.