To test the effect of linguistic experience on the perception of a cue that is known to be effective in distinguishing between [1') and [I) in English, 21 Japanese and 39 American adults were tested on discrimination of a set of synthetic speech-like stimuli. The 13 "speech" stimuli in this set varied in the initial stationary frequency of the third formant (F3) and its subsequent transition into the vowel over a range sufficient to produce the perception of [1' a) and [I a) for American subjects and to produce [1' a) (which is not in phonemic contrast to [I a)) for Japanese subjects. Discrimination tests of a comparable set of stimuli consisting of the isolated F3 components provided a "nonspeech" control. For Americans, the discrimination of the speech stimuli was nearly categorical, i.e., comparison pairs which were identified as different phonemes were discriminated with high accuracy, while pairs which were identified as the same phoneme were discriminated relatively poorly. In comparison, discrimination of speech stimuli by Japanese subjects was only slightly better than chance for all comparison pairs. Performance on nonspeech stimuli, however, was virtually identical for Japanese and American subjects; both groups showed highly accurate discrimination of all comparison pairs. These results suggest that the effect of linguistic experience is specific to perception in the "speech mode." One way to examine the effect of linguistic experience on the perception of speech is to compare the discrimination of phonetic segments by two groups of speakers: one group speaks a language in
A computer program for simulation of the tongue as a three-dimensional static elastic system has been written for studying the physiological functions of certain extrinsic and intrinsic muscles in speech production. Forty-four tetrahedra are employed to represent one-half of the tongue, assuming symmetry in respect to the midsagittal plane. Uniform stress and strain distribution is assumed in each tetrahedron, with elastic constants representing an approximate volume incompressibility, and displacements of the nodal points (vertices) are calculated by the finite-element method. The entire set of tetrahedra are grouped into 14 functional units, each of which can be given independently specified uniform stress in any direction representing an independent muscle contraction. In addition, specific node points can be pulled by an external force. Computation is made iteratively a few times for a given set of muscle contractions deriving a deformation consistent with palatal and other boundary constraints. The resultant shape is displayed in stereopsis with a knob-controlled viewing angle.
Tongue gestures during speech utterances were studied by use of computerized dynamic palatography [O. Fujimura, I. F. Tatsumi, and R. Kagaya, J. Phonetics 1, 47–54 (1972)]. An artificial palate with 64 independent electrodes was used to record the palato-lingual contact patterns at a rate of 100 frames per second. Some computer programs have been developed for recording a large number of speech samples, to display contact patterns as viewed from two different angles for visual examination and to compute the number of the electrodes in contact with the tongue within specific portions of the palate as a function of time. A number of utterances of various V1CV2- and V1V2-type nonsense words have been examined, and some characteristics of the coarticulartory effects, including the palatalization of consonants when succeeded by/i/, are discussed with physiological interpretations.
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