Discrimination of intensity differences on formant-like transitions

Dorman (1974) studied the discrimination of intensity differences on formant transitions in and out of syllable context. He interpreted his results as suggesting that the acoustic features of his stop-consonant/vowel syllable were recoded into a phonetic representation, then stored in an inaccessible form of auditory short-term memory. The Dorman results are replicated with analogous pure-tone and FM-glide conditions. The results of both studies are explained in terms of specified acoustic properties of the signals and thus provide no evidence for a special phonetic recoding.