Auditory property detectors and processing place features in stop consonants

The effects of selective adaptation on the perception of consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli varying in place of production was studied under two conditions. In the first condition, repeated presentation of a CV syllable produced an adaptation effect resulting in a shift in the locus of the phonetic boundary between [ba] and [da]. This result replicated previously reported findings. However, in the second condition, an adaptation effect was obtained on this same test series when the critical acoustic information (i.e., formant transitions) was present in final position of a VC speech-like syllable. These latter results support an auditory account of selective adaptation based on the spectral similarity of the adapting stimuli and test series rather than a more abstract linguistic account based on phonetic identity.