Haskins Publications

Number	435
Year	1983
Drawer	7
Entry Date	11/19/1999
Authors	Repp, B. H.
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Publication	Speech Communication, 2, 341-361.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0435.pdf
Abstract	When several different acoustic cues contribute to the perception of a phonetic distinction, a trading relation among the cues can be demonstrated in an identification task as long as the speech stimuli are phonetically ambiguous. The present 5 experiments, with 56 university students, examined whether the cues trade in unambiguous stimuli, using a fixed-standard same^different discrimination task with stimuli either from the vicinity of the phonetic category boundary or from within a phonetic category. Results suggest that 4 of the 5 trading relations examined were tied to the perception of phonetic contrasts, in that they disappeared or reversed within categories. The one predicted exception represented a trading relation presumed to originate at a psychoacoustic level. Data severely restrict psychoacoustic explanations for these effects and also suggest that within-category discrimination is not achieved in a phonetic mode of perception, thus affirming a dual-process view of speech discrimination. According to such a view, speech discrimination involves a phonetic component that represents the contribution to perception of the individual's past experience of phonetic category prototypes and an auditory component that merely provides the raw material on which the phonetic component operates.
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