Effects of the reliability of a single cue on (speech) categories have also been demonstrated. Clayards et al. (2008) investigated the effect of the reliability of voice onset time (VOT), which is the primary acoustic cue for voicing of word initial stop consonants (Francis et al. 2008). Listeners identified isolated words as either (i) “beach” or “peach,” (ii) “beak” or “peak,” and (iii) “bees” or “peas.” For each pair, a continuum of VOT values was generated. Short VOTs correspond to words such as “beach” and long VOTs to words such as “peach.” For each word in each pair, the VOT values were drawn from a “Gaussian distribution” with a mean corresponding to the prototypical value for that word in American English (e.g., 0 and 50 ms for beach and peach). Stimuli were synthesized using the Klatt synthesizer (Klatt 1980) with all parameters except VOT held constant for each pair and modeled on natural stimuli. The independent variable was the variance of the two VOT distributions. One group of listeners was presented with exemplars of words generated using a small variance for the two VOT distributions, giving high reliability of the VOT cue, and the other group was presented with exemplars of words generated using a large variance, giving low reliability of the VOT cue. The probability of categorizing a word as, for example, peach as a function of VOT (i.e. the categorization function), was affected by the variance of the two VOT distributions; the slope of the categorization function was shallower for the listeners presented with the VOTs from the two wider distributions than for the group presented with VOTs from the two narrower distributions. Thus, listeners were sensitive to the entire probability distribution of the VOT, and the categorization of words with given VOTs was dependent on the distribution of previously experienced VOTs, i.e., on the experienced reliability of the VOTs.