The Perception of Temporally Segmented Vowels and Consonant-Vowel Syllables

Abstract

The minimum initial-portion durations required by listeners for the correct identification of spoken isolated vowels and consonant-vowel (CV) syllables were determined. Eight vowels /i i u u æ ε a Λ/ and 64 CVs comprised of each of eight consonants /b p d t g k d 3 t∫/ in combination with each of the eight vowels were used. Segments consisted of the initial 10 to 150 milliseconds of each stimulus in 10-msec steps. The major findings were (1) clues for better than chance correct identification of tongue advancement and tongue height values for isolated vowels occur within the first 10 msec of the stimuli whereas approximately 30 msec of the stimuli are needed for the tense-lax feature to reach threshold, (2) clues for better than chance correct identification of place of articulation for the stop consonants are found within the initial 10 msec of the CVs whereas approximately 22 msec are needed for the voicing threshold to reach threshold, and (3) the threshold of voicing increases from front to back place of articulation for the stop consonants. The implications of the findings are discussed.

Nasal place assimilation and the perceptibility of place contrasts

“…The results in fact showed evidence for higher saliency of oral stops' place contrasts in the speech reception threshold condition, but also showed the evidence for the opposite pattern in the other three conditions. However, these results should again be interpreted with caution, because the experiment artificially removed bursts from the stimuli, which crucially affects the perceptibility of place contrasts (Kochetov & So, 2007;Malécot, 1956;Smits et al, 1996;Stevens & Blumstein, 1978;Tekieli & Cullinan, 1979;Winitz et al, 1972). This concern is not a trivial one, because in English even pre-consonantal consonants are often accompanied by a burst (Henderson & Repp, 1982).…”

Perception of static and dynamic acoustic cues to place of articulation in initial stop consonants

“…A related study directed at a somewhat different problem was carried out recently by Tekieli and Cullinan (1979). They measured the minimum duration necessary for listeners to identify consonants and vowels correctly from the electronically gated, initial portions of CV syllables, spoken by a single talker.…”

The temporal distribution of information in audiovisual spoken-word identification

“…Furthermore, synthetic speech, through its high and flexible temporal resolution, enables finegrained analyses of the temporal distribution within and across the speech signals. To provide fine-grained time course data, a gating study needs to tap into the speech stream very early and often so that it can capture the accumulation of speech information (Kiefte, 2003;Smits et al, 2003;Stevens & Blumstein, 1978;Tekieli & Cullinan, 1979). The temporal flexibility also allows producing and reproducing stimuli at any gate duration.…”