ABSTRACT
Words are pronounced in multiple ways in casual speech, which from the perspective of information transmission can be viewed as distortions that the listener must overcome to recognise the word intended by the talker. Two experiments explored the proposal that the recognition of pronunciation variants is facilitated by a lexically biased attentional set, which listeners adopt to compensate for fluctuations in signal reliability. Lexical decision responses were collected to multi-syllabic words in which a phoneme in one of four positions was gradually altered to make it a nonword. In Experiment 1, attention was manipulated through instruction. In Experiment 2, a lexically biased attentional set was induced by altering the design of Experiment 1. Results suggest that attention modulates lexical acceptability, damping lexical influences when attention is focused on perceiving the speech signal veridically (i.e., as pronounced), and maximising lexical biases when attention is focused on ensuring successful message transfer (i.e., perceiving the intended word).
