Identification of Consonants from Formant Transitions Presented Forward and Backward

Abstract

The effect of coarticulation on perception was studied by asking 18 subjects to identify the place of articulation of stop and fricative consonants from CV and VC vowel transitions played forward and backward. The factors investigated were: (A) transition direction, forward and backward; (B) transition position, CV and VC; (C) manner of production; (D) mode of production; and (E) place of production. The results indicate that: (1) with the exception of voiceless stops identified from forward CV transitions, consonants were identified considerably better than chance from CV and VC vowel transitions, (2) more correct identifications of consonants were made from VC transitions than from CV transitions in both the forward and backward play conditions, (3) backward play CV transitions produced much higher identification scores than those played forward, and (4) backward play VC transitions produced slightly lower identification scores than those played forward. These findings support the conclusion that VC transitions are more sufficient cues than CV transitions and that listeners derive more information from transitions when they are pre-consonantal than when they are post-consonantal.

Identification of deleted plosives: The effect of adding noise or applying a time window (A reply to Ohde and Sharf)

“…The next four columns give the detailed scores; the last two columns give combined scores. Sharf and Beiter (1974). As can be seen in the first three rows of Table I, there is considerable inconsistency among these scores and those found by Ohde and Sharf (1977), whereas the experimental conditions were quite similar.…”

Perceptual order and the effect of vocalic context on fricative perception

“…The literature on speech perception offers some indication that the heard order of acoustic cues can influence their interpretation (see Abbs, 1971;Sharf & Beiter, 1974;Sharf & Hemeyer, 1972); the final transitions in VC syllables seem to be more potent cues to consonant place of articulation than do the initial ones in CV syllables. To evaluate the possibility that heard order is a factor in the present asymmetry, in Experiment 3, we repeated Experiment 1 but played the stimuli backward so that the acoustic structure of each stimulus was heard in reverse.…”

“…The logic of comparing forward and backward presentation has been successfully applied by Sharf and Beiter (1974), who, noting that the consonants in VC syllables are recognized more accurately than are those in CV syllables (Sharf & Hemeyer, 1972), went on to show that formant transitions make a greater contribution to consonant place of articulation when they follow a vocalic segment than when they precede it. Our question was whether heard order would be the more important factor in the asymmetric effects of preceding and following vocalic segments.…”

L2 Processing of Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Information

“…A sample auditory stimulus for the unique referent condition is given in (5), and one for the nonunique condition is given in (6). The speaker was instructed to take a brief pause between the articles (the or a) and nouns as indicated in ( 5) and ( 6) to prevent the formant transition of the vowel in the articles from hinting at the initial consonant segment of the disambiguating noun (Ostreicher & Sharf, 1976;Sharf & Beiter, 1974). When the sentences were edited, the length of the pauses was modulated to be 500 ms for all items.…”