Lexical effects on the perception of /l/ allophones in English

Previous work has shown that perception of allophones of /p/ in English utterances was influenced by lexical status. In nonwords, the aspirated allophone was preferred whether appropriate or not; in words, the appropriate allophone was preferred [Whalen, Best, & Irwin (1997), J. Phonetics, 25, 501-528]. Here, we examined dark and light [l] in English words and nonwords. Dark [l] occurs in syllable codas whereas light [l] occurs in onsets. Items were selected in pairs to balance syllable position in monosyllabic English words and pseudowords, such as “gel”/“ledge”, “teal”/“leat”, and “beel”/“leeb.” Frequency of occurrence for words was also manipulated to explore compatibility with versions of exemplar theory. A phonetician produced two versions of each item, one with a contextually appropriate allophone and one with the inappropriate. Listeners were asked to rate where each acoustically presented item fell on a Likert scale (1-7) between “ideal (native) pronunciation” or “bad (nonnative) pronunciation.” Results will be discussed in terms of the underlying representation needed to account for lexical effects in perception. The relationship to phonotactic rules will also be discussed.