Formalising phonological perception: The role of voicing assimilation in consonant cluster perception in Emilian dialects

Abstract

Speech perception is influenced by language-specific phonological knowledge. While phonotactics has long been established to play a role, the study of how phonological alternations influence perception is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make a case for the latter by investigating the role of regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) in the perception of obstruent clusters in Emilian dialects of Italian. We provide empirical evidence from a phoneme-detection task, in which Emilian listeners reported to have heard [b] significantly more often in stimuli with a /p/ before a voiced obstruent (RVA context) than before a vowel (non-RVA context). Our experimental findings add to recent work on the influence of phonology on speech perception. In addition, we provide an explicit formalisation, which bolsters the need for a rigid distinction between phonetic, surface and underlying representation, and an explicit mapping between all three, both in the process of speech production and comprehension.

Decision Tree Versus Linear Support Vector Machine Classifier in the Screening of Medial Speech Sounds: A Quest for a Sound Rationale

“…In addition to enlarging the data set and including other classes of consonants, we also intend to enhance the classification method by adding features determined by (language-specific) phonotactic constraints [11] as sub-classes. Such sub-classes would help generate a more granular division of the results, pointing the SLPs to specific (phonologically determined) sub-sets of speech sounds to be correlated with speech sound development and speech acquisition.…”