Haskins Publications

Number	520
Year	1985
Drawer	9
Entry Date	11/18/1999
Authors	Repp, B. H.
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Publication	Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 11, 799-813.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0520.pdf
Abstract	Five experiments, with 25 undergraduates, examined the perceptual stability of stop consonants cued by silence alone, as when [s] + silence + [laet] is perceived as splat. Following a replication of this perceptual integration phenomenon, attempts were made to block it by instructing Subjects to disregard the initial [s] and to focus instead on the onset of the following signal, which was varied from [plaet] to [laet]. However, these instructions had little effect at short silence durations, and they reduced stop percepts for only 2 Ss at longer silence durations. That is, Ss were generally unable to voluntarily dissociate the [s] noise from the following signal and thus to perceive the silent interval as silence rather than as a carrier of phonetic information. A low-uncertainty paradigm facilitated the task somewhat. However, when the [s] frication was replaced with broadband noise, Subjects had no trouble in the selective-attention task, except at silence durations of less than 40 msec. Results support the hypothesis that perceptual integration of speech components, including silence, is a largely obligatory perceptual function driven by the listener's tacit knowledge of phonetic regularities.
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