ABSTRACT
The technique of selective adaptation has been used to study stages of human information processing in each of the major sensory modalities. In any event, the outcome of the experiment should be of some importance, since, to the extent that such visuoauditory effects can be shown to coincide with the effects obtained in regular auditory experiments, the case favoring a phonetic component of selective adaptation would be strengthened considerably. The adaptation effects appear to reflect the fatiguing of a speech processing mechanism that operates at some stage or stages of processing prior to the response decision stage. The contingent-adaptation procedure applied should become a useful tool in future speech-adaptation research. The locus of the unadapted phonetic boundary for the series was significantly greater than the locus of the comparable series. Added support for the phonetic basis of one component of the place adaptation effects was provided in a crossed-vowel adaptation test.
