Accessing phonetic information during perceptual integration of temporally distributed cues

Abstract

A group of untrained subjects, as well as several experienced listeners, participated in two forced-choice reaction time experiments requiring discrimination between two different stop consonants in VCV context. The duration of the silent closure interval in the test utterances was varied to derive functions relating response latencies to closure duration. These functions indicated that untrained subjects responded in part, and experienced listeners responded exclusively, to the VC formant transitions, which preceded the closure. Given that, at closure durations below 200 ms, the phonetic information conveyed by pre- and post-closure cues (VC and CV formant transitions) is integrated into a single phonemic percept — that of an intervocalic stop consonant at a certain place of articulation — the present results indicate that phonetic information can be accessed during perceptual integration of temporally distributed cues, and by implication, that phonetic information is continuously extracted from the speech signal.