A test of linguistic influences in the perceptual organization of speech

Research in speech perception has explored how knowledge of a language influences phonetic perception. The current study investigated whether such linguistic influences extend to the perceptual (sequential) organization of speech. Listeners heard sinewave analogs of word pairs (e.g., loose seam, which contains a single [s] frication but is perceived as two /s/ phonemes) cycle continuously, which causes the stimulus to split apart into foreground...