PROBLEMS WITH CLICK DETECTION - INSIGHTS FROM CROSS-LINGUISTIC COMPARISONS

Cross-linguistic comparisons may shed light on the levels of processin g involved in the performance of psycholinguistic tasks. For instance, if the same pattern of results appears whether or not subjects unders tand the experimental materials, it may be concluded that the results do not reflect higher-level linguistic processing. In the present stud y, English and French listeners performed two tasks - click location a nd speeded click detection - with both English and French sentences, c losely matched for syntactic and phonological structure. Clicks were l ocated more accurately in open- than in closed-class words in both Eng lish and French; they were detected more rapidly in open- than in clos ed-class words in English, but not in French. The two listener groups produced the same pattern of responses, suggesting that higher-level l inguistic processing was not involved in the listeners' responses. It is concluded that click detection tasks are primarily sensitive to low -level (e.g. acoustic) effects, and hence are not well suited to the i nvestigation of linguistic processing.