Workshop on the Auditory Basis of Speech Perception Keele University, UK July 15-19, 1996

The Auditory Basis of Vocalic Speech Transitions

Astrid van Wieringen (1,2), Louis C. W. Pols (1)

(1) Institute of Phonetic Sciences Amsterdam/ IFOTT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
(2) Labo Experimentele ORL, Catholic University Leuven, Belgium

Discrimination experiments were performed to determine auditory sensitivity to changes in endpoint frequency, duration and rate-of-frequency change of short and rapid vocalic transitions varying in stimulus complexity from tone glides to multi-formant complex stimuli. The experiments show that the global pattern of discrimination functions is similar in many respects for the different kinds of stimuli, but that the perceptual importance of cues vary, depending on the changing stimulus property. The auditory basis of these different types of short transitions is examined further in speech perception experiments (ABX-discrimination, /b/ and /d/ classification, and absolute identification). The results of these tests suggest that the perception of vocalic transitions in speech is based on general auditory properties, and that it is limited more by attentional and masking constraints than by a speech-specific mechanism based on linguistic experience.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Wieringen, Astrid van / Pols, Louis C. W. (1996): "The auditory basis of vocalic speech transitions", In ABSP-1996, 166-169.