A previous study of Hindi VC transitions revealed that its five places of stop articulation exhibit considerable contextual variability. We studied whether these VC formant patterns may nevertheless contain sufficient cues to differentiate the place or whether they also require the cues at the stop release. Twenty-one listeners were asked to identify the final stop in syllables with varying place and preceding vowel, with and without the final stop release. There were 86% correct judgments of place with the stop releases but 63% without. In the gated condition the responses showed a marked asymmetry: stops normally having weak bursts (labial and dental) were most often correct but were also the favored erroneous response for the other stops. The results further suggest a qualification to Steriade's claim that retroflex stop's VC place cues are more robust than release: this may be true after low vowels but is not true after /i/.
Cite as: Ohala, M., Ohala, J.J. (1998) Correlation between consonantal VC transitions and degree of perceptual confusion of place contrast in hindi. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0238, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-471
@inproceedings{ohala98_icslp,
author={Manjari Ohala and John J. Ohala},
title={{Correlation between consonantal VC transitions and degree of perceptual confusion of place contrast in hindi}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0238},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-471}
}