Perceptual order and the effect of vocalic context on fricative perception

Abstract

This three-part study demonstrates that perceptual order can influence the integration of acoustic speech cues. In Experiment 1, the subjects labeled the lsl and If] in natural FV and VF syllables in which the frication was replaced with synthetic stimuli. Responses to these "hybrid" stimuli were influenced by cues in the vocalic segment as well as by the synthetic frication. However, the influence of the preceding vocalic cues was considerably weaker than was that of the following vocalic cues. Experiment 2 examined the acoustic bases for this asymmetry and consisted of analyses revealing that FV and VF syllables are similar in terms of the acoustic structures thought to underlie the vocalic context effects. Experiment 3 examined the perceptual bases for the asymmetry. A subset of the hybrid FV and VF stimuli were presented in reverse, such that the acoustic and perceptual bases for the asymmetry were pitted against each other in the listening task. The perceptual bases (i.e., the perceived order of the frication and vocalic cues) proved to be the determining factor. Current auditory processing models, such as backward recognition masking, preperceptual auditory storage, or models based on linguistic factors, do not adequately account for the observed asymmetries.Studies of speech perception have revealed that theacoustic cues that support perception of individual phonetic segments are overlapped and interwoven. Even in fricativevowel (FV) syllables such as sa, sha, su, and shu, where the vocalic portion is associated with the vowel and the frication portion with the fricative consonant, the vocalic portion contains perceptual information for the fricative as well as for the vowel (e.g., Mann & Repp, 1980). Likewise, the frication portion may contain information for the vowel (e.g., Yeni-Komshian & Soli, 1981). This spread of segmental information is attributed to the coarticulation of articulatory gestures for adjacent segments and has led some researchers to suggest that speech perception proceeds as if by reference to the way in which speech is produced (see Liberman & Mattingly, 1985;Mann & Repp, 1980). Previous studies of segmental perception in FV utterances have illustrated that listeners readily make use of acoustic information spread across the entire utterance. These studies provoke questions about the spread of segmental information in other combinations of segments and about how listeners integrate and weight this information in their perceptual judgments. The present research attempts to address these questions by comparing the effect of vocalic context on the perception of fricatives in FV and vowel-fricative (VF) stimuli. This comparison allowed us to determine how the order of vowel and fricative segments in an utterance influence the integration and weighting of information spread over the utterance.FV and VF syllables have several advantages for the proposed comparisons. The vocalic (periodic) and the frication (aperiodic) portions of a syllable can easily be separated, and either portion can ...

The effect of segmental order on fricative labeling by children and adults

“…Mann and Soli (1991) showed that adults assign little weight to acoustic properties within the vocalic portion of the syllable when the fricative follows, rather than precedes, the vowel. We wished to determine whether children would show a similar decrease in perceptual attention to attributes of the vocalic portion of the syllable when the fricative came at the end of the syllable, rather than at the beginning.…”

“…In another examination of the flexibility of adults' perceptual strategies for speech, Mann and Soli (1991) investigated changes in adults' weighting strategies in which there was dependence on the order of segments within the syllable. They found that adults paid less attention (assigned low weights) to both vocalic formant transition and to vowel quality in decisions offricative identity when the fricative came after the vowel (i.e., syllablefinal position), rather than before (i.e., syllable-initial position).…”

“…The present study was intended to investigate whether children would show shifts in weighting strategies, as adults do, for VF syllables. To achieve this goal, we could have simply replicated the procedures of Mann and Soli (1991) with children as listeners-that is, collect labeling data from children for FV and VF syllables (with samples presented in their original and reversed order) and examine whether labeling functions were similar for stimuli with the two kinds of syllabic structure. However, we included adults as listeners for two reasons.…”

Processing reduced word-forms in speech perception using probabilistic knowledge about speech production.

“…E-mail: holger.mitterer@mpi.nl or james.mcqueen@mpi.nl context (see, e.g., Fowler, 2005;Fowler, Best, & McRoberts, 1990;Fowler & Brown, 2000;Kingston & Macmillan, 1995;Lindblom & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967;Mann, 1980;Mann & Repp, 1980, 1981Mann & Soli, 1991;Mitterer, 2006b;Smits, 2001a). Once again, there are multiple theoretical variants of this view.…”

Sensorimotor adaptation affects perceptual compensation for coarticulation

“…Perceivers perceptually "compensated" for the coarticulatory effects of the nasal consonant on the preceding vowel by attributing acoustic information from one segment to the following segment. Research has identified a range of contexts in which CFC effects occur (e.g., Mann and Repp, 1980;Repp and Mann, 1981;Mann and Soli, 1991;Lotto and Kluender, 1998;Elman and McClelland, 1988;Mitterer and Blomert, 2003;Fowler, 2006), including synthesized, natural, and even non-speech contexts.…”