Fractal timing of verbal transforms

The paper deals with the timing pattern of perceptual change elicited by multiple repetitions of a syllable (the verbal-transformation effect). We show that the distribution of the dwell time, the time spent perceiving a given phonemic form before switching to another form, obeys a power law with an exponent valued between 1 and 2. This result is robust, occurring for meaningless syllables and for English words of different initial phonemic salience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that subjects are aware of the temporal dynamics of perceptual change. On the basis of these results, it is argued that within this paradigm the notion of a mean dwell time is ill defined and there is apparently no characteristic time scale for perceptual change.