Phonological neighborhood competition affects spoken word production irrespective of sentential context

• VOT hyperarticulation driven by neighborhood density, not specific voicing competitors.
• Contextual predictability affects VOTs of words produced in sentences.
• Neighborhood density effects persist irrespective of sentential context.
• Results support cascading activation models of spoken word production.

Two experiments examined the influence of phonologically similar neighbors on articulation of words’ initial stop consonants in order to investigate the conditions under which lexically-conditioned phonetic variation arises. In Experiment 1, participants produced words in isolation. Results showed that the voice-onset time (VOT) of a target’s initial voiceless stop was predicted by its overall neighborhood density, but not by its having a voicing minimal pair. In Experiment 2, participants read aloud the same targets after semantically predictive sentence contexts and after neutral sentence contexts. Results showed that, although VOTs were shorter in words produced after predictive contexts, the neighborhood density effect on VOT production persisted irrespective of context. These findings suggest that global competition from a word’s neighborhood affects spoken word production independently of contextual modulation and support models in which activation cascades automatically and obligatorily among all of a selected target word’s phonological neighbors during acoustic–phonetic encoding.