Asymmetries in Accessing Vowel Representations Are Driven by Phonological and Acoustic Properties: Neural and Behavioral Evidence From Natural German Minimal Pairs.

ABSTRACT: In vowel discrimination, commonly found discrimination patterns are directional asymmetries where discrimination is faster (or easier) if differing vowels are presented in a certain sequence compared to the reversed sequence. Different models of speech sound processing try to account for these asymmetries based on either phonetic or phonological properties. In this study, we tested and compared two of those often-discussed models, namely the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model (Lahiri and Reetz, 2002) and the Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework (Polka and Bohn, 2011). While most studies presented isolated vowels, we investigated a large stimulus set of German vowels in a more naturalistic setting within minimal pairs. We conducted an mismatch negativity (MMN) study in a passiv

SUBMITTER: Riedinger M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7930067 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature