Synthetic stimuli (generated at Haskins Laboratories) were used to elicit monaural identification and discrimination data for two seven‐step place continua /ba‐da; pa‐ta/, and two seven‐step voicing continua /ba‐pa; da‐ta/. Five subjects who demonstrated categorical perception participated in three dichotic experiments. Using the same stimuli, dichotic experimental tapes with stimulus onset asynchonies ranging from 0 to 200 msec were made. Subjects were instructed to identify the stimulus presented to the right ear, which was always the leading syllable and a canonical form (step one or seven of the four continua). The first experiment employed canonical forms as the masker. Experiment two used stimuli from steps two‐six from the voicing continua whereas experiment three used corresponding stimuli from the place continua. The target intelligibility data from experiments two and three were compared with data collected with data collected from experiment one and the monaural experiment. The influence of acoustic versus phonetic competition in the dichotic backward masking paradigm is discussed. [Work supported in part by NIH and Sigma XI.]