Vowel information is integrated across intervening nonlinguistic sounds

Abstract

When the fricative noise of a fricative‐vowel syllable is replaced by a noise from a different vocalic context, listeners experience delays in identifying both the fricative and the vowel (D. H. Whalen, Perception & Psychophysics, 1984). Listeners (unconsciously) detect a mismatch between the vowel information in the fricative noise and in the vocalic segment. In the current experiment, noises and vowels were again cross‐spliced, but, in addition, the first 60 ms of the vocalic segment either had a nonlinguistic noise added to it or was replaced by that noise. The fricative noise and the majority of the vocalic segment were left intact, and both were quite identifiable. Mismatches of vowel information caused delays for all stimuli, both originals and ones with the noise. Additionally, syllables with a portion replaced by noise took longer to identify than those that had the noise added to them. The results indicate that listeners integrate all relevant information even across a nonlinguistic noise. Similarly, having the signal present along with the noise delayed identifications less than replacing the signal completely. [Work supported by NIH.]