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. 1974;15(2):285-290.
doi: 10.3758/bf03213946.

Reaction times to comparisons within and across phonetic categories

David B Pisoni  1 , Jeffrey Tash
Affiliations

Reaction times to comparisons within and across phonetic categories

David B Pisoni et al. Percept Psychophys. 1974.

Abstract

Same-different reaction times (RTs) were obtained to pairs of synthetic speech sounds ranging perceptually from /ba/ through /pa/. Listeners responded "same" if both stimuli in a pair were the same phonetic segments (i.e., /ba/-/ba/ or /pa/-/pa/) or "different" if both stimuli were different phonetic segments (i.e., /ba/-/pa/ or /pa/-/ba/). RT for "same" responses was faster to pairs of acoustically identical stimuli (A-A) than to pairs of acoustically different stimuli (A-a) belonging to the same phonetic category. RT for "different" responses was faster for large acoustic differences across a phonetic boundary than for smaller acoustic differences across a phonetic boundary. The results suggest that acoustic information for stop consonants is available to listeners, although the retrieval of this information in discrimination will depend on the level of processing accessed by the particular information processing task.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flowchart of the stages of analysis involved in the “same”-“different” classification task. In Stage I, the pair of speech sounds is encoded. In Stage II, the acoustic similarity of the stimuli is evaluated, whereas in Stage III, the phonetic features are compared.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Description of the stimulus conditions employed in the matching task. Pairs of stimuli requiring a “same” response are selected from within a phonetic category; pairs of stimuli requiring a “different” response are selected from across phonetic categories.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Average identification function for the voice onset time continuum with the mean RT during identification.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Mean RT for “same” and “different” responses to within- and across-category comparisons. The number of steps between pair members reflects the magnitude of the acoustic difference in voice onset time (VOT).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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