Syllabic and phonemic representations for short-term memory of speech stimuli

An experiment is reported which uses a same-different matching paradigm in which subjects are required to indicate whether the consonants of a pair of consonant-diphthong syllables are the same or different. The question addressed is the operation of two hypothesized processes in the perception of speech sounds. The auditory level is shown to hold stimulus information for a brief period of time and be sensitive to allophonic variations within a stimulus. Moreover, matching at this level takes place by identity of the syllables rather than of the separate phoneme segments. The phonemic level is impaired when the diphthong segments of the pair leads to a contradictory match to that of the consonants of the pair, even though only the consonants are relevant to the matching decision.