Contextual effects on the perception of duration

Abstract

In the experiments reported here, listeners categorized and discriminated speech and non-speech analogue stimuli in which the durations of a vowel and a following consonant or their analogues were varied orthogonally. The listeners’ native languages differed in how these durations covary in speakers’ productions of such sequences. Because auditorist and autonomous models of speech perception hypothesize that the auditory qualities evoked by both kinds of stimuli determine their initial perceptual evaluation, they both predict that listeners from all the languages will respond similarly to non-speech analogues as they do to speech in both tasks. Because neither direct realist nor interactive models hypothesize such a processing stage, they predict instead that in the way in which vowel and consonant duration covary in the listeners’ native languages will determine how they categorize and discriminate the speech stimuli, and that all listeners will categorize and discriminate the non-speech differently from the speech stimuli. Listeners’ categorization of the speech stimuli did differ as a function of how these durations covary in their native languages, but all listeners discriminated the speech stimuli in the same way, and they all categorized and discriminated the non-speech stimuli in the same way, too. These similarities could arise from listeners adding the durations of the vowel and consonant intervals (or their analogues) in these tasks with these stimuli; they do so when linguistic experience does not influence them to perceive these durations otherwise. These results support an autonomous rather than interactive model in which listeners either add or apply their linguistic experience at a post-perceptual stage of processing. They do not however support an auditorist over a direct realist model because they provide no evidence that the signal’s acoustic properties are transformed during the hypothesized prior perceptual stage.

Geminate timing in Lebanese Arabic: the relationship between phonetic timing and phonological structure

“…This has been supported by evidence of vowel and/or consonant shortening in various languages (e.g., F. Al-Tamimi [2004] Hassan (2003) and Ghalib (1984) on Iraqi Arabic, Hansen (2003) on Persian, Homma (1981) on Japanese, Lahiri and Hankamer (1988) on Bengali and Turkish, McKay (1980) on Rembarrnga, and Tserdanelis and Arvaniti (2001) on Cypriot Greek. In languages like Persian (Hansen 2003), Finnish (Suomi and Ylitalo 2004), and Japanese (Idemaru and Guion 2008;Kingston et al 2009), the preceding vowel has actually been reported to be longer when preceding geminates than when preceding singletons. Due to the conflicting results regarding the role of preceding vowel length, the major cue for singleton and geminate distinction remains the duration of the consonant itself (Lahiri and Hankamer 1988;Esposito and Di Benedetto 1999;Arvaniti and Tserdanelis 2000;Ham 2001;Ladd and Scobbie 2004;Idemaru and Guion 2008;Ridouane 2010) or the ratio of the consonant to the preceding vowel (Pind 1999;Hansen 2004).…”

Not all geminates are created equal: Evidence from Maltese glottal consonants

“…The existence of such differences indicates that a one-size-fits-all explanation for gemination is unlikely to be successful. There are clear differences between languages; languages differ in how gemination is implemented (Kingston et al, 2009) and in priming effects caused by singleton and geminate mispronunciations (Italian: more priming for geminates; Bengali: more priming for singletons). The current data indicate that even within a language, different geminate consonants may differ from one another in how they are implemented.…”

“…Previous work has often focussed on the duration of the surrounding vowels for singleton-geminate distinctions (Kingston et al, 2009). Therefore, we also tested whether the duration of the surrounding vowels depends on quantity.…”

“…Most languages show a contrastive pattern, so that vowels are phonetically shorter next to long consonants. Japanese provides a counterexample to this pattern by lengthening vowels before geminates (Kingston, Kawahara, Chambless, Mash, & Brenner-Alsop, 2009). These effects lead to languagespecific learning, so that listeners will use vowel length to categorize consonants as singletons or geminates according to the production pattern in their native language.…”

“…These effects lead to languagespecific learning, so that listeners will use vowel length to categorize consonants as singletons or geminates according to the production pattern in their native language. Japanese listeners give more geminate responses when the preceding vowel is long, while Norwegian and Italian listeners-from languages with a contrastive pattern-give fewer geminate responses when the preceding vowel is long (see Kingston et al, 2009). This suggests that there also is languagespecific phonetic knowledge (Kingston & Diehl, 1994) on how to implement the singleton-geminate contrast.…”