Speech sound identification influenced by adjacent “restored” phonemes

Abstract

When listeners' identifications of speech sounds are influenced by adjacent sounds, do they operate only on the physical phonetic characteristics of there sounds or could they also use just their linguistic identity? We tested this by leading subjects to restore or induce the noise‐obliterated medial consonant in VCV utterances by first presenting them with several prior utterances where this medial consonant was consistently the same, either a /b/ or /d/. Included as V1 were synthetic vowels from the /i‐u/ continuum. As expected, more /u/s were identified out of this continuum in the environment of physically present /d/s than /b/s [Ohala et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 64, S18 (1978)]. But restored /d/s and /b/s had the same effect (though with slightly less intensity) thus indicating that the influence of context need not operate only via physical phonetic features. We discuss the implications of this finding for “direct realist” theories of speech perception and for claims of the existence of inv...