INTERMEDIATE REPRESENTATIONS IN SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION - EVIDENCE FROM WORD ILLUSIONS

A new paradigm that may be appropriate for uncovering speech perceptual codes is presented. Illusory words (e.g., (sic) are detected (Experiments and 2) or spontaneously identified (Experiment 3) by blending two dichotic stimuli (e.g., (sic). According to the logic of illusory conjuctions, the speech property involved in such illusions must be separately registered as an independent entity in the course of the recognition process. In addition, the design allows comparison of different properties by the manipulation of the distribution of information between the two inputs (e.g., for initial consonant, (sic); for first vowel (sic). The results show that illusory word targets are more frequently experienced when the distribution corresponds to syllables than when it corresponds to either the initial consonant (and its phonetic features) of the first vowel. Illusory words are also more frequent when the distribution corresponds to syllables than when it does not correspond to any obvious phonological property (e.g., (sic). Moreover, in the identification task, illusory percepts only involve syllable combinations. These results extend previous observations of a major role of the syllable as a segmentation unit in French. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.