The role of phonological permissibility in the phonetic coding of speech
Carol A. Wannemacher, James R. Sawusch · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1989
Previous research has shown that phonological permissibility of a consonant sequence can affect the identification of an ambiguous phoneme [Massaro and Cohen (1983)]. The present experiment used both reaction time and identification measures to further explore this finding. With natural speech, little or no effect of phonological permissibility of a fricative-liquid sequence was found upon speed to classify the liquid. In the second experiment, a synthetic liquid series was constructed with endpoints varying in permissibility (depending on the fricative precursor). A speeded classification task was run and data were partitioned according to speed of response (cf. Fox, 1984). The results of this experiment, combined with the earlier findings, illustrate the relative roles of both acoustic-phonetic and phonological information in phonetic coding. The data will be discussed in terms of the data- and knowledge-driven influences upon phonetic coding. [Work supported by NINCDS.]