Abstract
When a speech segment is replaced by an extraneous sound of not too dissimilar spectral structure, the speech often seems intact (the “phoneme restoration” effect). Does this occur because the missing phonological segment is filled in at the level of lexical access, or because the missing phonetic information is filled in at a prelexical stage? This issue was investigated by probing subjects' perception of the extraneous noise burst that replaced the frication of an [s] inside a short sentence. The results showed that the noise was perceived as lower in “pitch” than an identical noise presented before or after the sentence, or inserted into the silent closure of a [th] in a similar sentence. This suggests that the [s] was restored phonetically by auditory subtraction from the noise occurring in its place, which left a perceived extraneous residue that was depleted of high frequency energy. Additional experiments investigated whether this “phone restoration” was induced by phonetic cues to the missing segment in adjacent signal portions, or whether lexical access played a role. [Work supported by NICHD.]
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