Auditory-perceptual analysis of selected syllables
James D. Miller · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1988
Analyses of consonant-vowel syllables (CVs) in terms of the auditory-perceptual theory of phonetic recognition will be presented. Examples of CVs will include a voiceless stop, a voiceless fricative, a nasal, and an approximant paired with monophthongal vowels. Spectral analyses are used to locate the formant peaks and to track these during the course of the syllable, producing a sequence of spectra, one for each ms of waveform. Formant and F0 information from these sequences is then converted into sensory and perceptual paths in the theory's auditory-perceptual space. This space contains subspaces, called perceptual target zones. The activation of a zone results in the output of a phonetic code. While the exact conditions for this activation are not yet known, it appears that certain aspects of the behavior of a perceptual path in relation to the perceptual target zones can determine the phonetic transcription of a syllable. [Work supported by NINCDS and AFOSR.]