Acoustic Versus Contextual Factors in Stop Voicing Perception in Spontaneous French

Abstract

Previous studies on the perception of French stop consonants in isolated utterances have demonstrated that the timing relationship between the onset/offet of voice and the release of the closure provides a very reliable acoustic criterion to separate voiced from voiceless stops, and a major cue for the perception of the voicing feature. The aim of this work is to examine stops pronounced spontaneously during a conversation. Experiment 1, an acoustic analysis of spontaneous productions, largely confirms the high reliability of voice timing cues but also shows that they can be occasionally misleading. Experiment 2, where subjects were asked to identify stops contained in excerpts from the conversation, confirms the major part played by voice timing in the perception of voicing. It also suggests that the reliability of the voice timing cues is not optimally exploited by the perceptual system. Experiment 3 and a control condition, where subjects were asked to write down the contents of excerpts varying in duration, demonstrate that the supplementary information that allows correct identification in the frame of the conversation is provided by top-down processes. These experiments also suggest that secondary acoustic cues play a decisive part in the case of conflict between voice timing cues and top-down information.

Phonetic Specificity in Early Lexical Acquisition: New Evidence from Consonants in Coda Positions

“…There was in any case no trace of prevoicing in any of the 24 voiceless coda consonants. The present values are similar to those previously reported for French (Saerens, Serniclaes, & Beeckmans, 1989). They show that the target consonant voicing contrasts were accurately realized by the speaker, with no overlap between the VOT distributions of voiced and voiceless consonants in either onset or coda positions.…”

Dental-to-velar perceptual assimilation: A cross-linguistic study of the perception of dental stop+/l/ clusters

“…For all other contexts, SCG was always lower for velars than dentals. Within the /l/ context, the difference was numerically, although not statistically larger for /dl/-/gl/ ͑250 Hz͒ Third, VOTs were significantly longer for velars than for dentals, consistent with the literature on VOT variation according to place of articulation ͑Fischer-Jørgensen, 1954; Lisker and Abramson, 1964;Nearey and Rochet, 1994;Peterson and Lehiste, 1960;Saerens et al, 1989;see Cho and Ladefoged, 1999, for an overview͒. For voiceless stops, VOTs were longer for velars than dentals ͑95 vs 55 ms on average͒ in both /l/ and /r/ contexts, F͑1,36͒ = 205.5, p Ͻ 0.00001.…”

Measurement of Voice Onset Time in Dysarthric Patients: Methodological Considerations

“…In English, voiced stops mainly fall into the short lag group and voiceless stops into the long lag group. Less data are available in French, but voiced stops correspond to voicing lead and voiceless stops to short lag [33][34][35].…”