Onset spectra versus formant transitions as cues to place of articulation
Amanda C. Walley, Thomas D. Carrell · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1980
Stevens and Blumstein [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, 648–662 (1980)] have proposed that the shape of the onset spectrum of a CV syllable provides listeners with a primary and contextually invariant cue to place of stop-consonant articulation. Contextually variable formant transitions, on the other hand, are claimed to constitute only “secondary” cues to place of articulation that are learned through their co-occurrence with the primary spectral ones. The present experiment assessed this claim about the relative importance of these two cues by obtaining listeners' identifications of synthetic stimuli whose onset spectra were matched to the Stevens and Blumstein spectral templates, but which contained conflicting transitions cues to place of articulation. The results indicated that listeners use formant transition information more often than the information contained in the stimulus onset—a result which argues against Stevens and Blumstein's claim that the static onset spectrum is the primary cue to place of articulation. However, because some listeners did consistently use the onset spectra cue for identification of place of articulation, it would seem that several perceptual strategies can be used in phoneme identification. [Work supported by NIMH and Research Council of Canada.]