“Please say what this word is”: Linguistic experience and acoustic context interact in vowel categorization

Abstract

Ladefoged and Broadbent [(1957). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 29(1), 98–104] is a foundational study in speech perception research, demonstrating that acoustic properties of earlier sounds alter perception of subsequent sounds: a context sentence with a lowered first formant (F1) frequency promotes perception of a raised F1 in a target word, and vice versa. The present study replicated the original with U.K. and U.S. listeners. While the direction of the perceptual shift was consistent with the original study, neither sample replicated the large effect sizes. This invites consideration of how linguistic experience relates to the magnitudes of these context effects.