THE CONTEXT-DEPENDENT STIMULUS SUFFIX EFFECT

Precategorical acoustic store (PAS) explains stimulus suffix effects by assuming that the suffix enters into a precategorical auditory store and interferes with the last item in the list. Two experiments replicate the finding of Ayres, Jonides, Reitman, Egan and Howard (1979) that the potency of a token to function as a suffix depends on the context in which it is interpreted rather than on the structural properties of a hypothesized store. Ss were led to believe that the suffix, the onomatopoetic English word baa, was produced either by a human or by a sheep. Larger suffix effects were obtained when the suffix was labeled as speech rather than nonspeech, despite the fact that the suffix was the same physical token in both cases. Experiment 2 found that while a previously effective suffix could lose its potency if relabeled from speech to nonspeech, the reverse was not observed.