Reaction Time in Phoneme Monitoring Varies with Segment Duration

This paper describes three phoneme monitoring experiments which show that reaction time increases with phoneme duration. Previous studies have shown that reaction time differs according to phoneme type (van Ooijen, Cutler and Norris 1992, Cutler, van Ooijen, Norris and Sanchez-Casas 1996). Our first experiment confirms this finding. Our results also suggested that differences in reaction time are partly dependent on segment duration. Two further phoneme monitoring experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis by manipulating the duration of the target vowel or consonant. In all of the experiments we found that target phoneme duration was a significant factor in reaction times.