A test of linguistic influences in the perceptual organization of speech

Research in speech perception has explored how knowledge of a language influences phonetic perception. The current study investigated whether such linguistic influences extend to the perceptual (sequential) organization of speech. Listeners heard sinewave analogs of word pairs (e.g., loose seam, which contains a single [s] frication but is perceived as two /s/ phonemes) cycle continuously, which causes the stimulus to split apart into foreground and background percepts. They had to identify the foreground percept when the stimuli were heard as nonspeech and then again when heard as speech. Of interest was how grouping changed across listening condition when [s] was heard as speech or as a hiss. Although the section of the signal that was identified as the foreground differed little across listening condition, a strong bias to perceive [s] as forming the onset of the foreground was observed in the speech condition (Experiment 1). This effect was reduced in Experiment 2 by increasing the stimulus repetition rate. Findings suggest that the sequential organization of speech arises from the interaction of auditory and linguistic processes, with the former constraining the latter.