On the psychological reality of the phoneme: Perception, identification, and consciousness

Foss, Donald J.; Swinney, David

doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(73)80069-6

Cited by 121 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…This result is inconsistent with a hypothesis that could u priori be taken as reasonable and, according to which, facility of detection is an inverse function of the phonological complexity of the target. It would be consistent, however, with the uncertainty hypothesis (Foss & Swinney, 1973;Swinney & Prather, 1980). One potential explanation for the present target effect is that CVC targets are more frequently detected than CV targets, because in the first case more cues are available and so subjects' uncertainty diminishes.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Morais¹,

Cary

Mehler

et al. 1989

Language and Cognitive Processes

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A total of 40 unschooled Portuguese adults, either illiterates or ex-illiterates, were presented auditorily with short sentences and asked to detect the occurrence of a word initiated by a specified syllable-sized target. The target was either CV or CVC, and the target-bearing word was initiated by either a CV or a CVC syllable. The dependent variable was the number of correct detections. Ex-illiterates performed better than illiterates. There was a significant interaction between target type and word structure: Detections were more numerous when the target coincided with the first syllable of the target-bearing word than when it did not. This effect is similar to the one obtained by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, and^Segui (1981) in a reaction-time study with French literate subjects, and shows evidence of a syllabification procedure. The fact that this syllable effect is obtained with illiterate subjects, regardless of their overall performance, suggests that the development of a syllabification procedure in speech processing depends primarily on informal experience with the language rather than on formal instruction.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Morais¹,

Cary

Mehler

et al. 1989

Language and Cognitive Processes

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“…Early accounts assumed phonology to be processed in terms of (optimally) functional units that distinguish between lexical items: phonemes. Phonemes were conceptualised as abstract, idealised representations of sound (Foss & Swinney, 1973;Meyer, 1990Meyer, , 1991Roelofs, 1999). In most experiments investigating phonology, phonological relatedness is measured in terms of phoneme overlap.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-level processing of phonetic variants in speech production and visual word processing: evidence from Mandarin lexical tones

Nixon

Chen

Schiller

2014

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Two picture-word interference experiments provide new evidence on the nature of phonological processing in speech production and visual word processing. In both experiments, responses were significantly faster either when distractor and target matched in tone category, but had different overt realisations (toneme condition) or when target and distractor matched in overt realisation, but mismatched in tone category (contour condition). Tone 3 sandhi is an allophone of Beijing Mandarin Tone 3 (T3). Its contour is similar to another tone, Tone 2. In Experiment 1, sandhi picture naming was faster with contour (Tone 2) and toneme (low Tone 3) distractors, compared to control distractors. This indicates both category and context-specific representations are activated in sandhi word production. In Experiment 2, both contour (Tone 2) and toneme (low Tone 3) picture naming was facilitated by visually presented sandhi distractors, compared to controls, evidence that category and context-specific instantiated representations are automatically activated during processing of visually presented words. Combined, the results point to multi-level processing of phonology, whether words are overtly produced or processed visually. Interestingly, there were differences in the time course of effects.

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“…In several recent experiments, a latencyof-detection task has been used to explore characteristics of speech processing. A case in point is the research of Foss and Swinney (1973), that demonstrated that two-syllable word targets were detected faster than their one-syllable counterparts, and that these in turn were detected faster than individual phonemes. Observations of this kind have motivated legitimate reservations about the relevance of the detection task to the analysis of perceptual stages.…”

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confidence: 99%

Initial phonemes are detected faster in spoken words than in spoken nonwords

Rubin

Turvey

Gelder

1976

Perception & Psychophysics

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In two experiments, subjects monitored sequences of spoken consonant-vowel-consonant words and nonwords for a specified initial phoneme. In Experiment I. the target-carrying monosyllables were embedded in sequences in which the monosyllables were all words or all nonwords. The possible contextual bias of Experiment I was minimized in Experiment II through a random mixing of target-earrying words and nonwords with foil words and nonwords. Target-carrying words were distinguished in both experiments from target-carrying nonwords only in the final consonant, e.g., fbitl vs. fbip/. In both experiments, subjects detected the specified consonant fbi significantly faster when it began a word than when it began a nonword. One interpretation of this result is that in speech perception lexical information is accessed before phonological information. This interpretation was questioned and preference was given to the view that the result reflected processes subsequent to perception: words become available to awareness faster than nonwords and therefore provide a basis for differential responding that much sooner.It is commonplace to conceptualize the process of pattern identification as a hierarchically organized sequence of operations that maps the structured energy at the receptors onto increasingly more abstract representations. In its most simplistic form, this conception characterizes the "conversation" between representations as unidirectional; that is, a more abstract representation is constructed with reference to a less abstract representation, but not vice versa. There are, however, a number of curious results that question the integrity of this characterization. By way of example, a briefly exposed and masked letter is recognized more accurately when part of a word than when part of a nonword (Wheeler, 1970; Reicher, Note 1). Other, related results suggest that this is a fairly general phenomenon. Thus, detection of an oriented line is significantly better when it is part of a briefly exposed, and masked, unitary picture of a well-formed threedimensional object than when it is a part of a picture portraying a less well-formed, and flat, arrangement of lines (Weisstein & Harris, 1974). As revealed in the work of Biederman and his colleagues

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On the psychological reality of the phoneme: Perception, identification, and consciousness

Cited by 121 publications

References 12 publications

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Syllabic segmentation and literacy

Multi-level processing of phonetic variants in speech production and visual word processing: evidence from Mandarin lexical tones

Initial phonemes are detected faster in spoken words than in spoken nonwords

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