In the early 1960's, Chistovitch and her colleagues used rapid shadowing (vocal reaction time) and manual reaction time to explore the perceptual processing of speech. Two ingriguing aspects of their data were the relatively fast vocal reaction times and the subjects' tendency to begin articulatory responses before all of the acoustic cues for consonants were presented. These results, among others, support the classic notion of an intimate link between perceptual analysis of speech signals and the mechanisms of control in speech production. The study to be reported replicates and extends some of Chistovitch's paradigms using modifications designed to eliminate possible sources of confounding. Results tend to support the conclusions of the Russian researchers and point to the additional ways in which the modified procedure might be used in exploring phonetic decoding. [Supported by NIH and the Sloan Foundation.]