On the Immediacy of Phonetic Perception

Abstract

If, as we believe, language is a specialization all the way down to its roots, then perception of its consonantal elements should be immediately phonetic, not as in the conventional view, a secondary translation from percepts of an auditory sort Supporting observations come from an experiment in which formant transitions that distinguish [da] and [ga] were presented as sinusoids and combined with a synthetic syllable made of resonances, thus causing the auditory system to treat these acoustically incoherent parts as different sources Evidence for the source difference was varied by changing the intensity of the sinusoids relative to the remainder of the syllable Over the greater part of a 60-dB range, listeners accurately identified the consonants, indicating that they had integrated the stimuli according to a coherence that existed only in the phonetic domain At the lowest intensities, indeed, the consonants were accurately identified, even though the whistles—the normal responses to the sinusoids—were not There followed then a range over which perception was duplex Both consonants and whistles were accurately identified At the highest intensities, phonetic integration failed, but accurate perception of the whistles was maintained That the phonetic percept was present when its auditory counterpart was absent, and vice versa, is evidence that the phonetic percept is independent of its auditory counterpart and not a translation from it, as is the fact that the two percepts followed very different courses in response to the experimental variable