Publication | Closed Access
The role of <i>F</i>1 amplitude in producing nasal percepts
32
Citations
0
References
1990
Year
PsychoacousticsPsycholinguisticsSpeech SciencePhonologySensory SystemsDynamic InformationSensory NeurosciencePhoneticsNasal PerceptsLanguage StudiesHealth SciencesF1 AmplitudeCognitive ScienceAuditory ModelingAuditory SystemSpeech AcousticRelative F1 AmplitudeOlfactionNeurobiological MechanismNeurophysiologyPhysiologySpeech AcousticsAuditory PhysiologyNeuroscienceSpeech PerceptionLinguisticsAuditory Neuroscience
A decrease in F1 amplitude is one of the most consistent acoustic consequences of nasal coupling. Despite the consistency of this effect, its importance for the perception of nasality has been given little attention. Listener judgments of the nasality of naturally produced oral and contextually nasalized vowels were evaluated in light of a time-varying analysis of relative F1 amplitude (A1-H1). Both average A1-H1, and change in A1-H1 over time, appear to correlate with nasality judgments. The nasalized vowels sometimes judged as oral were those that had larger A1-H1 values overall, more like those of oral vowels. On the other hand, the oral items sometimes judged as nasal did not have lower overall A1-H1 values; rather, they showed a marked decrease in A1-H1 over the course of the vowel, a pattern that was not observed for the oral items consistently judged as oral. Comparable experiments were designed using synthetic stimuli, which provide a control for pitch, vowel quality, and vowel duration differences that might have been present in the natural speech stimuli. Our results highlight the role of dynamic information in the perception of nasality. [Work supported by NIH.]