The stimulus suffix paradigm has been used to establish the importance of precategorical acoustic storage (PAS) as a theoretical construct in the investigation of attention and speech perception. Morton and Chambers concluded that sounds must have typical "speechlike" properties extracted at an early stage of processing in order to act as suffixes.
Morton & Chambers (1976) showed that the suffix effect ‐ a selective impairment in serial recall on the final serial position of an acoustically presented list ‐ was crucially affected by whether the suffix was a speech sound or a non‐speech sound. They also claimed that the classification of a sound as speech‐like was determined simply by the acoustic properties of the sound and not at all by the context. The crucial sound in their experiments was a steady state, naturally produced vowel sound which failed to give a suffix effect. We report here that when the sound was the only suffix used, it did produce a suffix effect. We conclude that, contrary to Morton & Chambers' conclusion, context effects are indeed operative in determining whether a sound produces a suffix effect.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.