Discriminability, response bias, and phoneme categories in discrimination of voice onset time

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Abstract
Signal detection methodology was employed in human subjects to distinguish between changes in discriminability and response bias and to reevaluate the role of phonetic categorization in the pheneme-boundary effect. A SAME-DIFFERENT discrimination task compared discrimination of 10 and 20 ms differences in voice onset time (VOT) in a synthetic stimulus continuum ranging from [ba] to [pa] (VOT''s from -50 to +70 ms). Both a clear increase in discriminability and a marked shift in response bias from SAME to DIFFERENT occurred near the voiced-voiceless boundary. When variations in VOT were isolated from syllable context so that they were not categorized as phonemes, discriminability increased near the voiced-voiceless boundary in a manner comparable to the full-syllable stimuli. The phoneme-boundary effect in VOT discrimination apparently reflects a genuine increase in discriminability near the phoneme boundary. The phoneme-boundary effect for VOT is probably not due exclusively to phonetic categorization but may instead reflect acoustic and auditory properties which are distinct from phonetic processing.

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