Precategorical acoustic storage for vowels of short and long duration

Abstract

Ss gave immediate ordered recall for series of seven isolated vowel sounds from a vocabulary of three-/a, u, i/. In a 2 by 2 design, the stimulus vowels were either 50 or 300 msec in duration (though always presented at a 2/sec rate), and the seven-item series was followed by either a nonverbal recall cue or a verbal recall cue that is a stimulus suffix. There was an interaction such that the recall impairment caused by the verbal suffix was larger when the stimulus items were vowels of long duration than when they were vowels of short duration. Since short vowels tend to be more categorically perceived than long vowels, this result reinforces the view that vowels and stop consonants are differently represented in auditory short-term memory for reasons that have to do with the way m winch they are perceived or vice versa. © 1973 Psychonomic Society, Inc.