False memories for varying and non-varying words in American English

ABSTRACT

Certain types of variation are licenced by phonotactics. For example, the American English phoneme /t/ varies word-finally (ba[t] ∼ ba[ʔ]), but not word-initially. We used a Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory paradigm to pursue the hypothesis that, given comparable information in the speech stream, varying words (such as bat) activate less strongly than non-varying words (such as tip). We presented listeners with lists of phonological neighbours, such as rat, ban, bet, etc. (neighbours of bat), and lip, tin, type, etc. (neighbours of tip), followed by recall and recognition tasks. Results showed that participants often “remembered” the unheard words bat and tip, replicating previous work indicating that activation from neighbours can produce false memories. Most importantly, false memory rates were significantly lower for bat compared to tip, suggesting that the presence of phonotactic conditions for variability affected the lexical activation of a word, compared to the absence of such conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Variation
• reduction
• false memory
• lexical activation

Acknowledgments

I thank Ellen Abolt, Rebecca Lehr, Dylan Pearson, and Amara Sankhagowit for research assistance. I thank Ivan Ascher, Fred Eckman, and Teri Mannes for assistance with pilot tests. I also thank audiences at the Midwestern Phonology Conference (2014), and the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (2015) for feedback, and Eleni Pinnow and an anonymous reviewer for suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript. Any flaws are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Growth Initiative, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee [101X292].