The role of coarticulatory acoustic detail in the perception of verbal inflection

The present study investigates the informativity of anticipatory coarticulatory acoustic detail about inflectional suffixes in English verbs, performing two experiments in which listeners classified inflectional functions of verbs. Listener response latencies were slower when acoustic detail resulting from anticipatory coarticulation mismatched with the inflectional suffix. The results indicate that listeners actively use coarticulatory phonetic detail to predict the verbs' inflectional function.