Context effects in perception of vowels differentiated by F 1 are not influenced by variability in talkers' mean F 1 or F 3 .

Spectral properties of earlier sounds (context) influence recognition of later sounds (target). Acoustic variability in context stimuli can disrupt this process. When mean fundamental frequencies (f0's) of preceding context sentences were highly variable across trials, shifts in target vowel categorization [due to spectral contrast effects (SCEs)] were smaller than when sentence mean f0's were less variable; when sentences were rearranged to exhibit high or low variability in mean first formant frequencies (F) in a given block, SCE magnitudes were equivalent [Assgari, Theodore, and Stilp (2019) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 145(3), 1443-1454]. However, since sentences were originally chosen based on variability in mean f0, stimuli underrepresented the extent to which mean F could vary. Here, target vowels (/ɪ/-/ɛ/) were categorized following context sentences that varied substantially in mean F (experiment 1) or mean F (experiment 2) with variability in mean f0 held constant. In experiment 1, SCE magnitudes were equivalent whether context sentences had high or low variability in mean F; the same pattern was observed in experiment 2 for new sentences with high or low variability in mean F. Variability in some acoustic properties (mean f0) can be more perceptually consequential than others (mean F, mean F), but these results may be task-dependent.