Abstract:

This study explored the verbal transformation effect, a perceptual phenomenon in which participants report hearing illusory words while listening to a recycling word. The Node Structure Theory, or NST [D. G. MacKay, G. Wulf, C. Yin, and L. Abrams, J. Mem. Lang. 32, 624--646 (1993)], an interactive model of speech perception and production, has been proposed to account for this phenomenon. Two experiments tested NST's claim that verbal transformations have a lexical origin. Experiment 1 examined the influence that lexical information has on the perception of transformations by comparing words and pseudowords. Experiment 2 used the standard (perception-only) task to explore NST's concept of lexical node stability (the idea that lexical items cause fewer VTs than nonlexical items) and its relationship to the number and types of transformations participants perceive. The results suggest that while the locus of the VTE is not lexical, lexical information does influence the types of transformations participants perceive.