Dichotic performance for temporally altered consonant-vowel tokens.

Eight normal subjects were tested in a dichotic consonant-vowel identification task where synthetic tokens of the stops + [æ] ranging in duration from 40 to 296 msec were used as challenges against 296-msec tokens from the same synthetic set. Subjects were required to identify both items in a dichotic pair. As challenge durations were reduced, their dichotic performance dropped paralleling monaural intelligibility, voiceless items being more severely affected than voiced items. Performance for the nonshortened items increased as the duration of the challenges dropped, in a manner not entirely reflecting the challenge intelligibility loss. Additionally, a 'backward-masking' effect of temporally remote vowel segments on competing consonant identification was clearly shown. [Supported by National Institutes of Health, USPHS Grant No. NH 11647-01.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]