Acoustic distinctiveness in speech processing of homophones

Homophones of differing relative frequencies often have differences that can be observed in acoustic analysis. The differences that are most prominent in the literature are durational, as the word which has higher relative frequency will likely undergo some form of reduction. However, despite the durational contrasts among homophones, there is debate on whether listeners actively disambiguate these homophones acoustically and if so, what cues they may use. Acoustic distinctiveness is a variable that has been shown to be a significant indicator of lexical competition in spoken word recognition. It is the sum of acoustic distance over time, describing what is occurring acoustically throughout the duration of the word. Acoustic distinctiveness highly correlates with duration. Using response time data taken from the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision dataset, this study will compare the use of duration and acoustic distinctiveness on participants’ response times in spoken word recognition tasks. This study will contribute to our understanding of the relative importance of acoustic distinctiveness in spoken word recognition and homophone disambiguation.