Perception of Dichotically Presented Stop Consonants in Relation to Amount and Kind of Information Shared by Ears

Abstract

Earlier experiments had shown that dichotically presented stops are more often identified correctly when they share place of production (e.g.,/ba, pa/) or voicing (e.g., /ba, da/) than when neither feature is shared (e.g., /ba, ta/). We interpreted this as further evidence for the perceptual reality of phonetic features. It is possible, however, that the advantage of sharing a feature has an auditory rather than a phonetic basis. We therefore compared the increments due to feature sharing, for synthetic stop-vowel syllables in which formant transitions were the sole cues to place of production, under two experimental conditions: (1) when the vowel was the same for both syllables in a dichotic pair, as in our earlier studies, and (2) when the vowels differed. If the increment in performance due to sharing place is not diminished when vowels differ (so that formant transitions do not coincide), we can conclude that it accrues after the process of feature extraction and therefore has a phonetic rather than an auditory basis. [Research supported in part by grant from NICHD.]