Feature parsing: feature cue mapping in spoken word recognition.

For listeners to recognize words, they must map temporally distributed phonetic feature cues onto higher order phonological representations. Three experiments are reported that were performed to examine what information listeners extract from assimilated segments (e.g., place-assimilated tokens of cone that resemble comb) and how they interpret it. Experiment 1 employed form priming to demonstrate that listeners activate the underlying form of CONE, but not of its neighbor (COMB). Experiment 2 employed phoneme monitoring to show that the same assimilated tokens facilitate the perception of postassimilation context. Together, the results of these two experiments suggest that listeners recover both the underlying place of the modified item and information about the subsequent item from the same modified segment. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 1, using different postassimilation contexts to demonstrate that context effects do not reflect familiarity with a given assimilation process. The results are discussed in the context of general auditory grouping mechanisms.