Perception of /r/ and /l/ in a stop cluster: evidence of cross-modal context effects.

Experiments were conducted investigating unimodal and cross-modal phonetic context effects on /r/ and /l/ identifications to test a hypothesis that context effects arise in early auditory speech processing. Experiment 1 demonstrated an influence of a preceding bilabial stop consonant on the acoustic realization of /r/ and /l/ produced within the stop clusters /ibri/ and /ibli/. In Experiment 2, members of an acoustic /iri/ to /ili/ continuum were paired with an acoustic /ibi/. These dichotic tokens were associated with an increase in "l" identification relative to the /iri/ to /ili/ continuum. In Experiment 3, the /iri/ to /ili/ tokens were dubbed onto a video of a talker saying /ibi/. This condition was associated with a reliable perceptual shift relative to an auditory-only condition in which the /iri/ to /ili/ tokens were presented by themselves, ruling out an account of these context effects as arising during early auditory processing.