“…Unfortunately, they did not manipulate higher formants, which also vary in frequency at voicing offset as a function of consonant voicing (Nittrouer, Estee, Lowenstein, and Smith, submitted). Furthermore, the changing (i.e., dynamic) nature of formant transitions is generally considered to be critical to speech recognition for both adults and children (e.g., Browman and Goldstein, 1990;Miranda and Strange, 1989;Nittrouer, Manning, and Meyer, 1993;Strange, 1989;Sussman, MacNeilage, and Hanson, 1973), owing in part to demonstrations that listeners can understand signals in which sinusoids are substituted for center formant frequencies (e.g., Remez, Rubin, Pisoni, and Carrell, 1981). In these "sinewave" signals, many acoustic properties traditionally associated with phonetic perception are missing.…”