| Two issues in auditory word recognition were investigated. Experiments 1 and 2 examined whether the phoneme or the syllable is the smallest linguistic unit that the perceptual system uses in word construction. Experiment 3 investigated whether the syllable onset (syllable-initial consonants) is perceived as an integral, cohesive unit, or whether the consonants constituting the onset are perceived individually.; A variant of the phoneme monitoring task, in which subjects make a speeded response to the occurrence of a prespecified phoneme in word, was developed to investigate these issues. The target phoneme (the phoneme to be monitored for) occurred in different consonant locations in a word. The probability with which the target phoneme occurred in a given location was varied to induce subjects to attend more closely to one consonant location than to others.; The results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that the phoneme can be a unit of perception. The findings of Experiment 3 indicate that the consonants of a syllable onset are perceived individually.; This project also investigated the flexibility of auditory selective attention during the phoneme monitoring task. The results of the three experiments indicate that attention can be tuned to a single consonant location, and can be disengaged fairly rapidly from this location. |
