Now you hear me, now you don’t: perception of highly lenited Chilean Spanish approximants and its implications for lexical access models

Chilean Spanish is special in that it displays particularly high degrees of lenition and elision of [β̞�], [ð̞]� and [ɣ̞] (Pérez, 2007). Interestingly, Chilean Spanish listeners can recover elided units effortlessly, which challenges the assumptions of some lexical access models, such as strong bottom-up abstractionist models (Mitterer & Ernestus, 2006). This proposal reports on a series of perception experiments in which synthetic continua from full approximants to elided variants were presented in several informational conditions. Results showed that increasing the amount of acoustic information and the number of semantic cues had a significant effect on listeners' responses, enabling lexical effects and minimizing phonological recovery. Moreover, these effects were different for the three consonants being tested, probably due to existing links between production and perception. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on lexical effects and recovery, and lexical access models in general