Perceiving speech during orthographic syllable recognition: Beyond phonemic identity

In the cue-distractor paradigm, individuals observe a spoken distractor syllable while responding to a visual cue referring to a syllable. When the task is to utter the cued syllable, distractors sharing fewer subphonemic properties with the cued syllable (below the level of phonemes) lead to slower reaction times (RTs), indicating representations involved in speech perception and production are closely linked. The present study investigated whether a subphonemic level of representation is involved when the task was to manually indicate (but not produce) an orthographically cued syllable. Results revealed RT modulations closely mirroring those reported previously for uttered responses. In an additional experiment, phonetic variants of phonologically identical distractors were presented, but RT modulations were unaffected by this manipulation. The present findings indicate that perceiving speech accesses a relatively detailed phonological level of representation which is closely aligned with representations pertinent in orthographic syllable recognition and in speech production.