“…There are also converging results from the phonology literature, where there is a growing awareness that phonological categories are more graded in both production and perception than have been typically assumed (Hall, 2009;Smolensky, Goldrick, & Mathis, 2014;Warner, Jongman, Sereno, & Kemps, 2004). Factors affecting the strength of perceptual assimilation (i.e., tolerance of variance) may include the predictability of the vowel in context (Shaw & Kawahara, 2017), functional load (e.g., Hockett, 1967), phonological neighborhood density (Munson & Solomon, 2004), or phonetic salience (Carlson, Granstöm, & Klatt, 1979;Escudero & Vasiliev, 2011;Rosner & Pickering, 1994), factors that we plan to pursue in future studies.…”