Multiple production studies have established that words are lengthened when a word with the same onset has been recently heard or produced by the speaker. These results are consistent with competing activation of phonological information, or with the speaker informing the listener about the word’s discourse status. Given the robust pattern of lengthening in production studies, the present study aimed to investigate the role duration alone has on listener perception. In a forced-choice multi-modal picture selection task, 60 participants heard a non-cohort/cohort prime stimulus and selected a target word from two images. Targets were of neutral length, shortened, or lengthened. If listeners pay attention to the durational variation, length should affect reaction times (RTs). RTs analyzed from the point of phonetic divergence between image options revealed the expected significant differences between cohort and non-cohort conditions, but no significant effects or interactions of the length factor (ps 0.9), suggesting that listeners may not attune to the durational difference, at least when it is manipulated independently of other acoustic cues. These results present an apparent mismatch between what listeners attend to and the information available in the signal. A follow-up study employing mousetracking is currently in development.
Bianchini et al. (Wed,) studied this question.