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Abstract:
In an eye-tracking study, we examined how fine-grained phonetic detail, such as segment duration,
influences the lexical competition process during spoken word recognition. Dutch listeners’ eye movements
to pictures of four objects were monitored as they heard sentences in which a stop-initial target
word (e.g., pijp “pipe”) was preceded by an [s]. The participants made more fixations to pictures of
cluster-initial words (e.g., spijker “nail”) when they heard a long [s] (mean duration, 103 msec) than
when they heard a short [s] (mean duration, 73 msec). Conversely, the participants made more fixations
to pictures of the stop-initial words when they heard a short [s] than when they heard a long [s].
Lexical competition between stop- and cluster-initial words, therefore, is modulated by segment duration
differences of only 30 msec.
