Distinctive Features and Errors in Short-Term Memory for English Vowels

Abstract

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.

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