Stimulus order effects in vowel discrimination

Abstract

In same–different discrimination tasks employing isolated vowel sounds, subjects often give significantly more ‘‘different’’ responses to one order of two stimuli than to the other order. Cowan and Morse [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 500–507 (1986)] proposed a neutralization hypothesis to account for such effects: The first vowel in a pair is assumed to change its quality in memory in the direction of the neutral vowel, schwa. Three experiments were conducted using a variety of vowels and some initial support for the hypothesis was obtained, using a large stimulus set, but conflicting evidence with smaller stimulus sets. Rather than becoming more similar to schwa, the first vowel in a pair seems to drift toward the interior of the stimulus range employed in a given test. Several possible explanations are discussed for this tendency and its relation to presentation order effects obtained in other psychophysical paradigms is noted.