A three-tone sinusoidal replica of a naturally produced utterance was identified by listeners, despite the readily apparent unnatural speech quality of the signal. The time-varying properties of these highly artificial acoustic signals are apparently sufficient to support perception of the linguistic message in the absence of traditional acoustic cues for phonetic segments.

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Accounts of the identification of words and talkers commonly rely on different acoustic properties. To identify a word, a perceiver discards acoustic aspects of an utterance that are talker specific, forming an abstract representation of the linguistic message with which to probe a mental lexicon. To identify a talker, a perceiver discards acoustic aspects of an utterance specific to particular phonemes, creating a representation of voice quality with which to search for familiar talkers in long-term memory. In 3 experiments, sinewave replicas of natural speech sampled from 10 talkers eliminated natural voice quality while preserving idiosyncratic phonetic variation. Listeners identified the sinewave talkers without recourse to acoustic attributes of natural voice quality. This finding supports a revised description of speech perception in which the phonetic properties of utterances serve to identify both words and talkers.

How does a perceiver resolve the linguistic properties of an utterance? This question has motivated many investigations within the study of speech perception and a great variety of explanations. In a retrospective summary 15 years ago, Klatt (1989) reviewed a large sample of theoretical descriptions of the perceiver's ability to project the sensory effects of speech, exhibiting inexhaustible variety, into a finite and small number of linguistically defined attributes, whether features, phones, phonemes, syllables, or words. Although he noted many distinctions among the accounts, with few exceptions they exhibited a common feature. Each presumed that perception begins with a speech signal, well-composed and fit to analyze. This common premise shared by otherwise divergent explanations of perception obliges the models to admit severe and unintended constraints on their applicability. To exist within the limits set by this simplifying assumption, the models are restricted to a domain in which speech is the only sound; moreover, only a single talker ever speaks at once. Although this designation is easily met in laboratory samples, it is safe to say that it is rare in vivo. Moreover, in their exclusive devotion to the perception of speech the models are tacitly modular (Fodor, 1983), whether or not they acknowledge it.Despite the consequences of this dedication of perceptual models to speech and speech alone, there has been a plausible and convenient way to persist in invoking the simplifying assumption. This fundamental premise survives intact if a preliminary process of perceptual organization finds a speech signal, follows its patterned variation amid the effects of other sound sources, and delivers it whole and ready to analyze for linguistic properties. The indifference to the conditions imposed by the common perspective reflects an apparent consensus that perceptual organization of speech is simple, automatic, and accomplished by generic means. However, despite the rapidly established perceptual coherence of the constituents of a speech signal, the perceptual organization of speech cannot be reduced to the available and well-established principles of auditory perceptual organization.

In two experiments, subjects monitored sequences of spoken consonant-vowel-consonant words and nonwords for a specified initial phoneme. In Experiment I. the target-carrying monosyllables were embedded in sequences in which the monosyllables were all words or all nonwords. The possible contextual bias of Experiment I was minimized in Experiment II through a random mixing of target-earrying words and nonwords with foil words and nonwords. Target-carrying words were distinguished in both experiments from target-carrying nonwords only in the final consonant, e.g., fbitl vs. fbip/. In both experiments, subjects detected the specified consonant fbi significantly faster when it began a word than when it began a nonword. One interpretation of this result is that in speech perception lexical information is accessed before phonological information. This interpretation was questioned and preference was given to the view that the result reflected processes subsequent to perception: words become available to awareness faster than nonwords and therefore provide a basis for differential responding that much sooner.It is commonplace to conceptualize the process of pattern identification as a hierarchically organized sequence of operations that maps the structured energy at the receptors onto increasingly more abstract representations. In its most simplistic form, this conception characterizes the "conversation" between representations as unidirectional; that is, a more abstract representation is constructed with reference to a less abstract representation, but not vice versa. There are, however, a number of curious results that question the integrity of this characterization. By way of example, a briefly exposed and masked letter is recognized more accurately when part of a word than when part of a nonword (Wheeler, 1970; Reicher, Note 1). Other, related results suggest that this is a fairly general phenomenon. Thus, detection of an oriented line is significantly better when it is part of a briefly exposed, and masked, unitary picture of a well-formed threedimensional object than when it is a part of a picture portraying a less well-formed, and flat, arrangement of lines (Weisstein & Harris, 1974). As revealed in the work of Biederman and his colleagues