A landmark-cue-based approach to analyzing the acoustic realizations of American English intervocalic flaps

Abstract

This study examines the acoustic realizations of American English intervocalic flaps in the TIMIT corpus, using the landmark-critical feature-cue-based framework. Three different acoustic patterns of flaps are described: (i) both closure and release landmarks present, (ii) only the closure landmark present, and (iii) both landmarks deleted. The patterns occur consistently across several phonological and morphological conditions but vary with sociolinguistic factors, including speaker dialect and gender. This method of analysing speech at the level of acoustic landmarks and other individual cues to distinctive features contributes to a deeper understanding of how speakers and listeners employ systematic variation in phonetic detail in speech processing.

Congruent aero-tactile stimuli bias perception of voicing continua

“…According to this view, the same mechanisms of audition and perceptual learning are used for perception of all types of sounds. Thus, from this perspective, the objects of speech perception may be acoustic or auditory objects, or acoustic landmarks which convey information about the gestures that produced them (Stevens, 2002;Yun et al, 2020). These approaches posit an intermediate representation constructed from sensory input.…”