Phonemic microtomy: The minimum duration of perceptible speech sounds

Gray, Giles Wilkeson

doi:10.1080/03637754209390064

Cited by 26 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…Powell and Tosi (1970) found that the median recognition threshold varies from vowel to vowel from about 10 to 30 msec. The results of their experiments, however, were not in good agreement with those previously obtained by Peterson (1939), Gray (1942), and Joos (1948) on vowel fragments. In other studies (Schwartz, 1963;Fujisaki & Kawashima, 1968), it was reported that vowels could be correctly identified at durations of the order of 30 msec.…”

Section: Discrimination Of Vowel Sounds Of Very Short Duration*contrasting

confidence: 53%

“…Burck, Kotowski, and Lichte (described in Stevens & Davis, 1937) found that the duration of 10 msec of a low-frequency tone was not long enough for identification of the pitch of the tone. However, Peterson (1939), Gray (1942), andJoos (1948) reported that vowel fragments less than 10 msec could be recognized.…”

Section: Discrimination Of Vowel Sounds Of Very Short Duration*mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Discrimination of vowel sounds of very short duration

Suen

Beddoes

1972

Perception & Psychophysics

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An experiment was conducted to investigate the discrimination of sjx vowel sounds of 10 msec duration. Vowels of equal pitch and intensity level were generated by computer. Both phonetically trained (PT) and untrained (UPT) Ss were used. Rapid learning took place, and the PT Ss showed much better discrimination than the UPT Ss. Confusion matrices of the last four learning blocks indicated that IiI and luI sounded very much alike when they were short.

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Section: Discrimination Of Vowel Sounds Of Very Short Duration*contrasting

confidence: 53%

Section: Discrimination Of Vowel Sounds Of Very Short Duration*mentioning

confidence: 99%

Discrimination of vowel sounds of very short duration

Suen

Beddoes

1972

Perception & Psychophysics

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“…Review ofthe literature revealed that much ofthe research on vowel identification as a function of the length of the stimulus portions presented (e.g., Fairbanks & Grubb, 1961;Gray, 1942;Powell & Tosi, 1970;Robinson & Patterson, 1995;Schwartz, 1963;Stevens, 1959;Suen & Beddoes, 1972) relied on steady-state conceptions of the relevant information for vowels and used stimuli that must be considered as impoverished by today's standards. Evidence from many sources argues that information for the identification of vowels spoken in sentence context is spread throughout the syllable and is modified by consonantal context in major ways, suggesting that many dynamic sources are available.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Earlier studies of the extent of vowel duration that is required for accurate identification of the vowels in American English (e.g., Fairbanks & Grubb, 1961;Gray, 1942;Powell & Tosi, 1970;Robinson & Patterson, 1995;Schwartz, 1963;Stevens, 1959;Suen & Beddoes, 1972) must now be viewed in a new light because they specifically excluded the dynamic sources of information for vowel identification. All of these studies employed gated, sustained vowels by trained speakers or synthe- sized steady-state vowels.…”

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confidence: 99%

Perception of dynamic information for vowels in syllable onsets and offsets

Jenkins

Strange

1999

Perception & Psychophysics

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It has been demonstrated using the "silent-center" (SC) syllable paradigm that there is sufficient information in syllable onsets and offsets, taken together, to support accurate identification of vowels spoken in both citation-form syllables and syllables spoken in sentence context. Using edited natural speech stimuli, the present study examined the identification of American English vowels when increasing amounts of syllable onsets alone or syllable offsets alone were presented in their original sentence context. The stimuli were /d /-vowel-/ d / syllables spoken in a short carrier sentence by a male speaker. Listeners attempted to identify the vowels in experimental conditions that differed in the number of pitch periods presented and whether the pitch periods were from syllable onsets or syllable offsets. In general, syllable onsets were more informative than syllable offsets, although neither onsets nor offsets alone specified vowel identity as well as onsets and offsets together (SC syllables). Vowels differed widely in ease of identification; the diphthongized long vowels /e l, / reI, /0/ were especially difficult to identify from syllable offsets. Identification of vowels as "front" or "back" was accurate, even from short samples of the syllable; however, vowel "height" was quite difficult to determine, again, especially from syllable offsets. The results emphasize the perceptual importance of time-varying acoustic parameters, which are the direct consequence of the articulatory dynamics involved in producing syllables.For many years it was the "received view" that the primary information for vowel identification was carried in the quasi-steady-state vocalic portions of syllables and that this information could be characterized in terms of static vowel "targets" (i.e., the relative frequencies of the first two or three formants of the vocal tract). Acoustic descriptions of vowels were traditionally given as a set of formant values measured from a single spectral section taken at the steady-state or durational midpoint of the syllable (Joos, 1948; Ladefoged, 1967;Peterson & Barney, 1952). Such a description now seems to be too limited. There have been hints in the literature for almost 50 years that steady-state vowels did not capture the information used by listeners in normal communicative use. Tiffany (1953) showed that vowels of several durations, gated out of sustained vowel productions (eliminating onsets and offsets) were not as readily identifiable as 200-msec isolated vowels that included onsets and offsets, and that these in tum were not as identifiable as 200-msec stimuli produced in a consonant context (It! V /p/). Fairbanks and Grubb (1961) found only 74% identifiability of nine

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“…From the point of view of acoustics, finding the shortest duration supporting recognition amounts to identifying the "minimal features" that distinguish a sound category from another. In a classic study, Gray (1942) coined the term "phonemic microtomy" for this approach applied to speech sounds. For biology, the time constants of sound recognition (as indexed by different brain responses to different sound categories) put strong constraints on the type of neural mechanisms involved (Roye et al, 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

Suied¹,

Agus

Thorpe

et al. 2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Sounds such as the voice or musical instruments can be recognized on the basis of timbre alone. Here, sound recognition was investigated with severely reduced timbre cues. Short snippets of naturally recorded sounds were extracted from a large corpus. Listeners were asked to report a target category (e.g., sung voices) among other sounds (e.g., musical instruments). All sound categories covered the same pitch range, so the task had to be solved on timbre cues alone. The minimum duration for which performance was above chance was found to be short, on the order of a few milliseconds, with the best performance for voice targets. Performance was independent of pitch and was maintained when stimuli contained less than a full waveform cycle. Recognition was not generally better when the sound snippets were time-aligned with the sound onset compared to when they were extracted with a random starting time. Finally, performance did not depend on feedback or training, suggesting that the cues used by listeners in the artificial gating task were similar to those relevant for longer, more familiar sounds. The results show that timbre cues for sound recognition are available at a variety of time scales, including very short ones.

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Phonemic microtomy: The minimum duration of perceptible speech sounds

Cited by 26 publications

References 1 publication

Discrimination of vowel sounds of very short duration

Discrimination of vowel sounds of very short duration

Perception of dynamic information for vowels in syllable onsets and offsets

Auditory gist: Recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues

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