Perception of the place of articulation of French stop bursts

Abstract

This paper deals with the perception of French natural stop bursts and with the role played by the following vowel in this perception. The first experiment verified the ability of listeners to identify long stimuli containing the burst and part of the subsequent vowel. The second and third experiments investigated the identification of stop bursts with and without a priori knowledge of the following vowel. In order to determine the discriminating power of spectral characteristics of the burst, these experiments used fixed-length burst stimuli of 25-ms duration with all traces of vocalic segment cut off. The bursts of initial voiceless stops were extracted from CVC isolated words. The burst provided very reliable information about stop place since listeners identified correctly 87% of the stops, without a priori knowledge of the following vowel. Performance however was context-dependent. Knowing the identity of the vowel led to a slight but statistically significant improvement in stop identification. Nevertheless, the effects of this knowledge were selective and varied with context. Finally, the first experiment proved that a near perfect identification of stops can be achieved only when all main cues (burst spectrum, burst duration, and onset of vocalic formant transitions) were present simultaneously.

Measurement of Voice Onset Time in Dysarthric Patients: Methodological Considerations

“…The errors in the production of [k] were due to an incomplete contact of the back of the tongue to the velum, resulting in a continual emission of air. As the burst plays a major role in the perceptual determination of the place of articulation, such modifications may contribute to the indistinctness between the plosives [39,40].…”

Identification of vowel features from French stop bursts

“…We investigated the relations between the results of our previous experiment [1], concerning the identification of stop bursts as well as the influence of the specification of the context on this identification, and the results of the present experiment. The same stimuli were used in both experiments.…”

“…We used the corpus and the stimuli of a previous experiment concerning the perception of the place of articulation of French stop bursts [1]. The corpus was made up of 90 isolated monosyllabic CV or CVC words, extracted from the French database BDSONS [2], which combined the three initial voiceless stops /p,t,k/ with the three vowels /i,a,u/.…”

“…Knowledge about the identity of the following vowel, -whether its identity is revealed to the listeners, or whether the vowel, without any transition, is added to the burst signal-, leads to a slight improvement in stop identification [9,1]. The aim of this paper is to investigate another kind of contextual information: the vocalic information provided by the burst itself.…”

“…Winitz et al [12] reported that subjects could more than accidentally identify the adjacent vowels /i/, /a/ or /u/ from the entire burst of voiceless stops 1 , the corresponding rates of recognition being 90%, 54% and 50%. Subjects were revealed the identity of the consonant during the vowel recognition task.…”