Discrimination of intensity differences on format transitions in and out of syllable context

The Ss were presented pairs of stimuli, /bae/s, /ae/s, or isolated transitions from /bae/s, which differed in the initial 60 msec of the signals by 0, 7.5, or 9 dB. In the syllable context, the intensity differences were discriminated essentially at chance; in both the vowel and isolated transition conditions, the intensity differences were discriminated essentially perfectly. This outcome suggests that after the acoustic features of a stop-consonant/vowel syllable have been recorded into a phonetic representation, the acoustic information is relatively inaccessible for recall from auditory short-term memory.