How phonetic is selective adaptation? Experiments on syllable position and vowel environment

In several cases, the acoustic cues underlying a given phoneme depend heavily on its context. The selective adaptation method (Eimas & Corbit, 1973) was used to investigate the existence of detectors sensitive to consonants in any environment, irrespective of their acoustic properties. The first experiment concerned consonants in initial and final position. Repeated presentation of a CV syllable had an adapting effect on a CV continuum but not on a VC continuum. The converse was also true. In a second experiment, a detector for C1V1 was fatigued by repeated presentation of C1V2, even though the adapting C1 had very little acoustically in common with the test C1. It is concluded that there are detectors for phonemes, or possibly features, which respond to a fairly abstract representation of the input, but not so abstract that a C is represented the same in initial and final position.