The independent contribution of voice onset time to perceptual metrics of convergence

This work explores the relationship between phonetic and perceptual metrics for convergence in shadowed productions by adults and 6-year-old children by isolating the role of voice onset time (VOT) in listeners' similarity judgments. Results show a small but independent role for VOT: listeners were less likely to identify shadowed tokens as more similar to the model when natural VOT convergence present in the stimulus set had been artificially removed (experiments 1 and 2). However, VOT equivalence alone, when accompanied by naturally occurring variation along other dimensions, was not sufficient to drive listeners' judgments of similarity (experiment 3).