title: Insights from a failure of selective adaptation: syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants are different.
abstract: Selective adaptation with a syllable-initial consonant fails to affect perception of the same consonant in syllable-final position, and vice versa. One account of this well-replicated result invokes a cancellation explanation: with the place-of-articulation stimuli used, the pattern of formant transitions switches according to syllabic position, allowing putative phonetic-level effects to be opposed by putative acoustic-level effects. Three experiments tested the cancellation hypothesis by preempting the possibility of acoustic countereffects. In Experiment 1, the test syllables and adaptors were /r/-/l/CVs and VCs, which do not produce cancelling formant patterns across syllabic position. In Experiment 2, /b/-/d/ continua were used in a paired-contrast procedure, believed to be sensitive to phonetic, but not acoustic, identity. In Experiment 3, cross-ear adaptation, also believed to tap phonetic rather than acoustic processes, was used. All three experiments refuted the cancellation hypothesis. Instead, it appears that the perceptual process treats syllable-initial consonants and syllable-final ones as inherently different. These results provide support for the use of demisyllabic representations in speech perception.
authors.forename: A G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Samuel
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013067:Speech Perception