Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues

Abstract

Abstract Idiosyncratic perceptual compensation behaviors are considered to have a bearing on the perceptual foundation of sound change. We investigate how compensation processes driven by lexical and coarticulatory contexts simultaneously affect listeners’ perception of a single segment and the individual differences in the compensation patterns. Sibilants on an /s-ʃ/ continuum were embedded into four lexical frames that differed in whether the lexical context favored /s/ or /ʃ/ perceptually and whether the vocalic context favored /s/ or not. Forty-two participants took a lexical decision task to decide whether each stimulus was a word or not. They also completed the autism-spectrum quotient questionnaire. The aggregate results of the lexical decision task show coexistence of lexically induced and coarticulatorily induced perceptual shifts in parallel. A negative correlation was found between the two kinds of perceptual shifts for individual listeners in lexical decisions, lending support to a potential trade-off between compensation magnitudes on different levels of cue integration.