Sociophonetic realizations guide subsequent lexical access

Previous studies on spoken word recognition suggest that lexical access is facilitated when social information attributed to the voice is congruent with the social characteristics associated with the word. This paper builds on this work, presenting results from a lexical decision task in which target words associated with different age groups were preceded by sociophonetic primes. No age-related phonetic cues were provided within the target words; instead, the non-related prime words contained a sociophonetic variable involved in ongoing change. We found that age-associated words are recognized faster when preceded by an age-congruent phonetic variant in the prime word. The results demonstrate that lexical access is influenced by sociophonetic variation, a result which we argue arises from experience-based probabilities of covariation between sounds and words.