Levels of decision in the perception of voicing contrasts

Various types of acoustic cues have been shown to influence the voiced‐voiceless decision for initial prestressed consonants. In the present study, a selective adaptation method was used to investigate possible feature extraction devices underlying the perception of voicing. Two [da‐t^ha] continua were constructed, each ranging in voice onset time (VOT) from 0 to 55 msec in 5‐msec steps. The total transition duration of each stimulus was 15 msec in one series and 70 msec in the other. Differential effects were obtained for within‐ and cross‐series adaptation along a VOT dimension by presenting an adapting stimulus from each series with the same absolute VOT(25 msec). The present results support the view that models of voicing perception based strictly on absolute VOT detectors are inadequate. Further, they suggest that a sequence of decisions grounded in cue extraction is the basis for the voicing percept.