Noncategorical perception of a voiced stop: A replication

Several studies have purported to show that perception to stop consonants is categorical, i.e., the stimuli are discriminated only slightly better than they are identified. However, all of these studies have employed successive rather than simultaneous discrimination tasks, confounding the effects of memory with those of immediate perception. The present experiment minimized the role of memory by requiring Ss to identify the same set of synthetic voiced stops twice, first using three response categories (b, d, g) and then using two (b, g). Results indicated that six out of seven Ss who appeared to be categorical perceivers on the basis of preliminary traditional measures later demonstrated noncategorical perception of /d/. A view of speech processing was suggested whereby consonants are perceived continuously but remembered categorically in terms of an articulatory code.