The effect of allophonic processes on word recognition: Eye-tracking evidence from Canadian raising

Whether lexical representations are stored as abstract forms or exemplar tokens is the focus of much debate in both the phonological and word-recognition literature. This research report examines the recognition of words that have undergone Canadian raising and/or intervocalic flapping. Two eye-tracking experiments suggest that listeners are slower to fixate words that have undergone one or more phonological processes within their own raising dialect, supporting the idea that they must calculate a mapping from surface word forms to more abstract representations. Implications for representational and phonological theories are discussed.