Investigation of categorical perception for both phonetic and nonphonetic continua
Laura B. Harris, Richard E. Pastore · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1981
The phenomenon of categorical perception was examined using two synthetic speech continua and two associated nonphonetic continua. One of the two phonetic continua consisted of stimuli varying from /Bi/-/Di/ along the dimension of place of articulation while the other ranged from /Bi/-/Pi/ varying in VOT. Nonphonetic continua were synthesized using timing and frequency parameters obtained from the phonetic continua. Thus each phonetic series had a nonphonetic counterpart. Both phonetic continua were perceived in a classically categorical manner. While the nonphonetic analogs obtained comparable results in terms of labeling functions. Of interest is the variation in the obtained discrimination results for the nonphonetic stimuli. With one continuum, analogous to /Bi/-/Di/, discrimination was consistently very good across subjects, while the /Bi/-/Di/ analog continuum produced consistently poor (at chance) discrimination for two of three observers employed. These differences will be discussed with respect to the phenomenon of categorical perception. [Work supported by Grant BNS 80-03704 from NSF.]