The role of remote rate information and relative acoustic resemblance on phonetic representations.
Rochelle Suzanne Newman, James R. Sawusch · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1992
Miller and Liberman [Percept. Psychophys. 25, 457–465 (1979)] demonstrated that listeners use vowel duration information when making the /ba/–/wa/ distinction. They also found that adding a final consonant to the syllables shifted the /ba/–/wa/ boundary. However, they did not examine the effects of changing the final consonant duration. Furthermore, by using stimuli that were voiced throughout, the potential effects of acoustic and auditory similarity between the initial consonant distinction and the succeeding phonemes could not be examined. In this experiment CVC syllables were used to examine the effect of this later-occurring speaking rate information on an initial /sh/–/ch/ distinction. The syllables ended with /s/, and both vowel and final fricative duration were varied independently. This allowed one to examine the effect of acoustic similarity on the coding of rate information. The relevance of these results to the auditory and/or phonetic coding of speaking rate information will be discussed. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.]