Evoking biphone neighborhoods with verbal transformations: illusory changes demonstrate both lexical competition and inhibition.

When a recorded verbal stimulus repeats over and over, perceptual changes occur and listeners hear competing forms. These verbal transformations (VTs) were obtained for a phonemically related set of 24 consonant-vowel syllables that varied widely in frequency-weighted neighborhood density (FWND). Listener's initial transformations involving substitution of consonants versus vowels were strongly correlated with the lexical substitution neighborhood [r=+0.82, p<0.0001]. Interestingly, as stimulus FWND increased, average time spent hearing illusory forms substantially decreased [r=-0.75, p<0.0001]. These results suggest that VTs not only reveal underlying competitors, but also provide a highly sensitive measure of lexical inhibition.