Perception of Segments of Spoken (Hindi) VowelConsonant-Vowel Syllables
S. S. Agrawal, Srikant Gupta, Rais Ahmed · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1972
This study presents some results of an experiment conducted to determine the effect on perception of deleting different numbers of 10-msec segments from the initial and final parts of VCV syllables. Eight stop consonants /p,t,t,k,b,d,d,g/ and two affricates /ts,dz/ were combined with three pure vowels /i,a,u/ to produce 30 VCV stimulus words. An electronic gating apparatus was developed to present sequential segments of initial and final portions of these syllables. The VC and CV stimuli so obtained were used for two separate listening tests and the responses were analyzed for individual consonants as a function of time. Perceptual phoneme boundaries were found from the response curves and compared with the acoustical phoneme boundaries obtained from sonagrams. The results indicate that the transitions of initial and final vowels terminating in the consonant are of maximal importance for the recognition of intervocalic consonants. The data indicate that the plosive burst plays a more important part in the recognition of unvoiced stops than in the case of voiced stops. The plosive gap was found to play a greater role in the recognition of voiced stops. The affricates were found to utilize all the acoustic events for their recognition. The study of errors showed that for intervocalic consonants, the voicing feature was not recognized in the early part of the initial transition and in the end part of final transition.