The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1976 · 201 citations · 0 references
Language StudiesLinguisticsAcousticsPhoneticsPhonologyAcoustic PhoneticsAuditory PhoneticsExperimental PhoneticsSpeech AcousticsSpeech PerceptionVowel ClassificationAcoustic Phonetics Of VowelsAcoustic Phonological AnalysisAcoustic Vowel AnalysisAuditory AcousticsVowel AcousticsVowel PerceptionVowel Recognition
Previous work shows that static vowel production often leads to misidentification by naive listeners. The study compared vowel perception in isolated tokens versus consonant‑bound syllables across two experiments with 15 talkers, varying consonantal contexts. Vowels within consonant‑bound syllables were identified far more accurately than isolated vowels, an advantage not attributable to production errors, indicating listeners rely on dynamic acoustic cues across the syllable. The study is classified under 70.30, 70.40, and 70.70.
Past studies have shown that, while vowels can be produced with static vocal tract configurations, the resulting steady-state tokens are misidentified frequently by naive listeners. The first experiment compared the perception of isolated vowels with vowels spoken in a fixed consonantal frame by the same set of 15 talkers. Vowels in /p–p/ syllables were identified with far greater accuracy than were comparable isolated vowels in both single and multiple-talker conditions. Acoustical analyses of the test tokens showed that the poor intelligibility of isolated vowels could not be attributed to talkers’ failure to produce these vowels correctly. In a second experiment, vowels in syllables in which the initial and final stop consonant varied unpredictably from item to item were still identified with greater accuracy than were isolated vowels. These results offer strong evidence that dynamic acoustic information distributed over the temporal course of the syllable is utilized regularly by the listener to identify vowels. Subject Classifications: [43]70.30, [43]70.40, [43]70.70.