The impact of rhotic allophony on spoken-word recognition during sound change.

Maltese, a Semitic language spoken on the Mediterranean island of Malta, is experiencing a rhotic sound change from an alveolar trill to an alveolar approximant. In word onset position, approximants and trills appear with a similar frequency, which enables the investigation of allophonic effects in the absence of a frequency bias. Given claims that the trill is the most prototypical exemplar of the rhotic category (e.g., Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996), we hypothesized that the trills lead to faster word recognition. This was tested in two visual-world eye-tracking experiments. The first experiment used images and focused on word recognition in reasonably predictable sentences. The second experiment used printed words to also investigate competition effects, with the hypothesis that the phonetic similarity between the rhotic allophone and other segments modulates the amount of activation of similar words. Over the two experiments, an advantage for the trill variant was only found in the second experiment. Both studies also tested the prediction from gestural theories of speech perception that listeners should more easily recognize words that match their own productions. This was not observed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).