Total: 1
Homophones are words that are commonly assumed to sound the same but have different meanings. They are either homographic, sharing the same spelling, or heterographic, differing in spelling. This study focuses on heterographic homophones. Past studies have shown that the spoken word duration of such homophones is systematically related to their frequency of use. Building on this finding, we investigate whether and how the segmental realizations of homophones differ, using time-normalized spectrograms and derived phone logits. We analyzed 14,000 homophone tokens and found that words within homophone pairs differ in their segmental realizations. Further analysis indicates that the exact phonetic realization of a token is shaped by its meaning in the utterance context. These findings are more consistent with lexicon models that assume token-level alignment between form and meaning than with frameworks that posit segments as abstract formal symbols.