The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1965 · 99 citations · 0 references
Language StudiesLinguisticsPsychologyMemoryPhoneticsPsycholinguisticsAuditory PhoneticsDistinctive FeaturesExperimental PhoneticsPhonological Error PatternsPhonological MemoryVowel PhoneticsAuditory Short-term MemoryBack VowelsDistinctive Feature TheoryShort-term Verbal RecallVowel Error PatternsVowel FeaturesVowel PerceptionVowel Recognition
The study used six English vowels embedded in /l[ ]k/ and /z[ ]k/ contexts, had subjects copy and then recall the list, and excluded perceptual errors from the recall error matrix. Errors in recalling the six vowels were largely predicted by place and openness of articulation, with openness values showing a stronger forgetting tendency, indicating that short‑term memory encodes vowels as independent sets of two distinctive features.
Errors in short-term recall of six English vowels (I, ε, æ, U, ʌ, ɑ) were tabulated and related to several distinctive-feature systems. Vowels were embedded in two contexts: /l[ ]k/ and /z[ ]k/. Subjects were instructed to copy items as they were presented, followed by recall of the entire list of (six) items. Perceptual errors were excluded from the recall error matrix by scoring for recall only correctly copied items. The rank-order frequency of different intrusions in recall of each presented vowel was almost perfectly predicted by a conventional phonetic analysis in two dimensions: place of articulation (front, back) and openness of the vocal tract (narrow, medium, and wide). The error matrix also supported the assumptions that the values of openness are ordered in short-term memory and that the correct value on the openness dimension is more likely to be forgotten than the correct value on the place dimension. The study suggests that a vowel is coded in short-term memory, not as a unit, but as a set of two distinctive features, each of which may be forgotten independently.