Some effects of later-occurring information on the perception of stop consonant and semivowel

Abstract

In three experiments, we determined how perception of the syllable-initial distinction between the stop consonant [b] and the semivowel [w], when cued by duration of formant transitions, is affected by parts of the sound pattern that occur later in time. For the first experiment, we constructed four series of syllables, similar in that each had initial formant transitions ranging from one short enough for [ba] to one long enough for [wa], but different in overall syllable duration. The consequence in perception was that, as syllable duration increased, the [b-w] boundary moved toward transitions of longer duration. Then, in the second experiment, we increased the duration of the sound by adding a second syllable, Ida], (thus creating [bada-wada)), and observed that lengthening the second syllable also shifted the perceived [b-w] boundary in the first syllable toward transitions of longer duration; however, this effect was small by comparison with that produced when the first syllable was lengthened equivalently. In the third experiment, we found that altering the structure of the syllable had an effect that is not to be accounted for by the concomitant change in syllable duration: lengthening the syllable by adding syllable-final transitions appropriate for the stop consonant [d] (thus creating [bad-wad))caused the perceived [bow] boundary to shift toward transitions of shorter duration, an effect precisely opposite to that produced when the syllable was lengthened to the same extent by adding steady-state vowel. We suggest that, in all these cases, the later-occurring information specifies rate of articulation and that the effect on the earlier-occurring cue reflects an appropriate perceptual normalization.In exploratory work with synthetic speech, we chanced on a phenomenon that seemed to hold promise for the study of two related perceptual effects: most directly, how later-occurring aspects of the speech signal modify the perception of an earlieroccurring cue and, by implication, how duration of , the syllable specifies, inter alia, the articulatory rate to which the listener must adjust. Following the early findings of Liberman, Delattre, Gerstman, and Cooper (1956), we had used the duration of the initial consonant-vowel transitions to produce the perceived distinction in manner between stop-vowel (Ibal) and semivowel-vowel ([waD syllables. Then we varied the duration of the syllable-by extending the steady-state portion of the vowel-and observed that perception

Listeners recover /t/s that speakers reduce: Evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch

“…Previous results mainly indicated that the perception of the identity of a segment is affected by its adjacent segments (Lindblom & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967;Mann, 1980;Mann & Repp, 1981;Miller & Liberman, 1979;Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1996). Our present results add a new twist to such context effects by showing that adjacent segments also influence the perception of the presence of a segment (see Repp, 1983;Repp et al, 1978, for similar effects).…”

Abstraction-based Efficiency in the Lexicon

“…Some effects are to a greater or lesser degree indirect. Thus the rate of speech implied by just a single long or short vowel can influence decisions about the identity of an immediately preceding consonant (Miller and Liberman, 1979), a photograph of a person can suffice to cue the relevant talker characteristics (Hay, Warren and Drager, 2006), and exposure to a dialect label can bias the recall of the nature of a vowel sound (Hay, Nolan and Drager, 2006). Combined use of very different information sources -acoustics of the signal, stored knowledge in the lexicon or general knowledge in memory, abstract labels and prior episodes of cognitive or sensory processing -in an integrated fashion is however no problem for a system such as that proposed by the Merge model.…”

Lexical Information Drives Perceptual Learning of Distorted Speech: Evidence From the Comprehension of Noise-Vocoded Sentences.

“…These adaptation processes can take place very rapidly. For example, adaptation to natural changes in speech rate (e.g., J. L. Miller, 1981;J. L. Miller & Lieberman, 1979;Summerfield, 1981) or to changes in the spectral characteristics of the communication channel (Ladefoged & Broadbent, 1957;Summerfield, Haggard, Foster, & Gray, 1984;Watkins, 1991) occur in less than a second.…”