| Abstract | A previous study by the 1st author (see PA, Vol 72:8534) showed that when the fricative noise of a fricative-vowel syllable was replaced by a noise from a different vocalic context, Subjects experienced delays in identifying both the fricative and the vowel. Mismatching the information in the fricative noise for vowel and consonant identity with the information in the vocalic segment appeared to hamper processing. This effect was argued to be due to integration of the information relevant to phonetic categorization. The present 4 experiments, with 59 university students and 3 researchers, were intended to eliminate an alternative explanation based on acoustic discontinuities. Noises and vowels were again cross-spliced, but, in addition, the 1st 60 msec of the vocalic segment (which comprised the consonant-vowel transitions) either had a nonlinguistic noise added to it or was replaced by that noise. Mismatched consonant and vowel information both caused delays for original stimuli and for ones with noise added to the transitions. Results indicate that Subjects integrated all relevant information, even across a nonlinguistic noise. Completely replacing the signal delayed identifications more than did adding the noise to the original signal, although the Ss were not aware of any difference. |
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