Phoneme categorization relying solely on high-frequency energy

Abstract

Speech perception studies generally focus on the acoustic information present in the frequency regions below 6 kHz. Recent evidence suggests that there is perceptually relevant information in the higher frequencies, including information affecting speech intelligibility. This experiment examined whether listeners are able to accurately identify a subset of vowels and consonants in CV-context when only high-frequency (above 5 kHz) acoustic information is available (through high-pass filtering and masking of lower frequency energy). The findings reveal that listeners are capable of extracting information from these higher frequency regions to accurately identify certain consonants and vowels.