Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Acoustic and contextual cues to linguistic categories (e.g.,phonemes or words) tend to be temporally distributed acrossthe speech signal. Optimal cue integration thus requires main-tenance of subcategorical information over time. At the sametime, previous work suggests that finite sensory memory orprocessing capacity strongly limits how much subcategoricalinformation can be maintained (or for how long). We ar-gue that previous work might have over-interpreted the roleof these limitations. In two perception experiments, we findno limit in the ability to maintain subcategorical information.We also find that maintenance seems to be the default, neitherlimited to perceptually particularly ambiguous signals, nor alearned strategy specific to our experiment. In contrast, listen-ers’ decision for how long to delay categorization, we find, is afunction of perceptual ambiguity. It is therefore crucial to dis-tinguish between in-principle abilities (even when they reflectdefault processing), and decisions made within the bounds ofthose abilities.