Failure of selective attention to phonetic segments in consonant-vowel syllables

Abstract

Subjects performed a two-choice speeded classification task that required selective attention to either the consonant or the vowel in synthetic consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. When required to attend selectively to the consonant, subjects could not ignore irrelevant variation in the vowel. Similarly, when required to attend selectively to the vowel, they could not ignore irrelevant variation in the consonant. These results suggest that information about an initial stop consonant and the following vowel is processed as an integral unit.