Mapping the organization of vowel sequences into words
Magdalene H. Chalikia, Richard M. Warren · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1990
Previous research [Warren et al., Percept. Psychophys. (in press)] has shown that when listeners hear recycled sequences of steady-state vowels, they do not perceive them as a succession of vowels. Illusory phonemes are introduced and real or nonsense words are heard. Often the sequence of vowels is split perceptually in two simultaneous words differing in both quality and phonemic content. The present study employed sequences of eight 80-ms vowels, and mapped the perceptual phonemes to acoustic phoneroes by terminating the repeated sequence at various positions and determining the last sound heard in the perceived word for each position. When two simultaneous words were heard, they both were mapped. Relations between the acoustic phonemes and the perceived phonemes will be described, and implications concerning the perceptual organization of speech will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH and AFOSR.]