PERCEPTION OF CLICKS SUPERIMPOSED ON SENTENCES

Abstract

The so called click method was applied at different levels of speech processing. In Exp. I significantly more clicks which were superimposed on sentences were mislocated toward syntactic boundaries, and this phenomenon was observed to occur immediately after the presentation of stimuli. In Exp. II subjects were required to respond (a) immediately after they heard the click sound, (b) after the whole sentence was presented, (c) 15sec after the presentation of the sentence. Preliminary knowledge of sentences was also controlled. The results demonstrated that (1) syntactic boundary effect was irrelevant to S-R interval or to preliminary knowledge of background sentences, (2) when S-R interval became longer, backward mislocation toward a prior segment of the sentence increased. Some explanations of mislocation mechanism were briefly discussed.