Evaluation of various sets of acoustic cues for the perception of prevocalic stop consonants. I. Perception experiment

Abstract

The purpose of the study presented in this paper and the accompanying paper [Smits et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 3865-3881 (1996)] is to evaluate whether detailed or gross time-frequency structures are more relevant for the perception of place of articulation of prevocalic stop consonants. To this end, first a perception experiment is carried out with "burst-spliced" stop-vowel utterances, containing the Dutch stops /b,d,p,t/ and /k/. From the utterances burst-only, burstless, and cross-spliced stimuli were created and presented to listeners. The results of the experiment show that the relative importance of burst and transitions for the perception of place of articulation to a great extent depends on place and voicing of the stop consonant and on the vowel context. Velar bursts are generally more effective in cueing place of articulation than other bursts. There is no significant difference in the effectiveness of /p/, /t/, and /k/ transitions, while /b/ transitions are more effective than /d/ transitions. The release burst dominates the perception of place of articulation in front-vowel contexts, while the formant transitions are generally dominant in nonfront vowel contexts. The bursts of unvoiced stops are perceptually more important than the bursts of voiced stops.

Neural representation of spectral and temporal information in speech

“…An unexpected result is that the largest differences, in terms of dissimilarity (and therefore also discriminability of the responses), were seen in high-BF fibres (greater than 3 kHz) during the onset burst. Thus, the stimulus bursts provide substantial information for discriminating stop consonants (Stevens & Blumstein 1978;Smits et al 1996). The phase-locking analysis (figure 3) suggests that fibres should encode information about formants nearest their BFs.…”

Vocal tract resonances in speech, singing, and playing musical instruments

“…Coupling the nasal to the oral cavity not only modifies the frequency and amplitude of the oral resonances, but also adds further resonances and hence changes in the output sound (Feng and Castelli, 1996;Chen, 1997). When the vocal tract is constricted during the production of consonants, the variation in formants during the constricting or opening are important to recognition of the phoneme, as is the broadband sound associated with the opening or closing (Smits et al, 1996;Clark et al, 2007).…”

Discrimination of Voiced Stop Consonants Based on Auditory Nerve Discharges

“…For voiced stops (/b, d, g/ in English), the formant transitions are sufficient to identify the stop; bursts improve performance but are often weak cues by themselves (Stevens and Blumstein, 1978). However, for unvoiced stops (/p, t, k/ in English) and for some consonant-vowel combinations with voiced stops (e.g., "front" vowels like /i/), the burst may be quite important (for review, see Smits et al, 1996). Regardless, the neural representations studied here show a strong representation of the burst.…”

“…However, the spectra of stops depend on the context (i.e., the adjacent vowel). Invariant signatures that identify particular stops have not been found; instead, it seems that the auditory system can access many details of the spectrotemporal properties of a stop (Kewley-Port et al, 1983;Krull, 1990;Smits et al, 1996). Here, we consider the neural discrimination of the acoustic features of stops.…”

“…Stops at the closure of a syllable have only the formant transitions, in the opposite direction. The acoustic cues to the identity of stops have been defined in terms of the spectral characteristics of the burst and the formant transitions (Cooper et al, 1952;Delattre et al, 1955;Blumstein and Stevens, 1979;Kewley-Port, 1982;Smits et al, 1996). However, the spectra of stops depend on the context (i.e., the adjacent vowel).…”