Phonological constraints in speech perception
Dominic W. Massaro, Michael M. Cohen · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1980
Speech perception can be viewed in terms of the listener's integration of two sources of information: the acoustic features transduced by the auditory receptor system and constraints in the spoken language. In order to assess how these sources are evaluated and integrated, a speech continuum between the liquid-vowel syllables /ri/and /li/ was generated by varying the onset frequency of the third formant. Each sound along the continuum was placed in a consonant-cluster vowel syllable after an initial consonant /p/, /t/, /s/, and /v/. In English, both /r/ and /l/ are phonologically legal following /p/ but are not legal following /v/. Only /l/ is legal following /s/ and only /r/ is legal following /t/. Listeners identified the sounds as one of the eight alternatives /pri/, /pli/, /tri/, /tli/, /sri/, /sli/, /vri/, and /vli/ or simply identified the liquid portion of the test sound. These identifications to sounds generated by the factorial combination of acoustic featural information for the /r/-/l/ distinction and the legality of the phonological context allow quantitative tests of various models of how these two sources of information are evaluated and integrated together in speech perception. [Work supported by NIMH.]