Speech Perception Consistency Facilitates Initial Lexical Activation, but Not Speech Perception Flexibility

Speech perception consistency refers to the extent to which listeners provide similar responses to repeated presentations of the same speech sound (e.g., along a /ba/–/pa/ continuum). Although recent research has demonstrated multiple advantages of consistency across various domains, its role in initial lexical activation (i.e., early activation of word candidates during spoken-word recognition) and speech perception flexibility (e.g., the ability to recover from misperceptions) has not yet been tested. In this study, we reanalyzed data from a previous experiment showing that gradiency, or sensitivity to within-category variation, predicts speech perception flexibility in L1 Spanish but not in L2 English. Gradiency did not predict initial lexical activation in either language. In contrast, the present analyses revealed a different pattern for consistency: listeners with higher consistency exhibited higher initial lexical activation for acoustically compatible patterns for both /b/ and /p/ in L1 Spanish and for /p/ in L2 English, but showed no corresponding advantage in speech perception flexibility. Taken together, these findings indicate that speech perception consistency facilitates initial lexical activation to a large extent across languages, while playing a limited role in speech perception flexibility.