AUDITORY CODING, CUES, AND COHERENCE IN PHONETIC PERCEPTION

C. T. Best, M. Studdert-Kennedy, S. Manuel, and J. Rubin-Spitz (1989) reported that listeners given speech labels showed categorical-like pe rception of a series of complex tone analogs to a /la/-/ra/ speech ser ies, whereas nonspeech listeners were unable to classify the stimuli c onsistently. in 2 experiments, a new training and testing procedure wa s used with adult listeners given nonspeech instructions. They classif ied the /la/-/ra/ tone analogs consistently, showed categorical-like p erception, and generalized their training to a new, /li/-/ri/ tone ana log series. Two sets of auditory attributes were described for coding the /l/-/r/ distinction, and 1 was shown to quantitatively predict lis teners' classification of both series. These results are consistent wi th models of perception in which a rich, abstract auditory code is com puted and forms the basis for both speech and nonspeech auditory categ ories.