A brief memory strategy with distinctive features.

The study undertaken here reflects the perceptual strategies of adult listeners when a psychophysical method is applied in combination with a short memory task. The goal was to identify and describe some of the underlying strategies of distinctive-feature utilization associated with speech stimuli. The specific purpose of the study was to determine whether a hierarchical structure exists within the phonological domain of distinctive features. The secondary purpose was to determine whether the Chomsky and Halle (1968) distinctive feature system was relevant to and descriptive of the perceptual domain of the listener in speech processing mode. The evaluation of the responses was obtained through forced-choice discrimination in similarity of paired-dyadic stimuli with the Friedman (1937) two-way analysis of variance as the criterion measure for the relative amount of similarity of the paired dyads. The results reported as an outcome of the forced-choice, short-memory paradigm support aspects of related research. Results appear to suppoort the existence of a perceptual organization within the "atoms of speech." In addition, one may conclude that the Chomsky and Halle (1068) distinctive feature system appears to have some relevance and descriptivity of at least some phonemes in English.