Disambiguation of Segmental Dependencies by Extended Phonetic Context
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10255487 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter C Gordon (0000-0002-5845-0763, Harvard University, corresponding author), Christopher P Schaeffer (Harvard University), Shelia M Kennison (0000-0001-9298-3152, Harvard University) |
| Year | 1991 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 157-176 |
| Publication date | 1991-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language and Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0023-8309 • E-ISSN: 1756-6053 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/002383099103400203 |
| OpenAlex | W1512644084 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This research investigated listeners' ability to recognize adjacent vowels and consonants that are conveyed in part by a common temporal cue – vowel duration. The stimuli consisted of a large sample of natural speech containing nonsense syllables made by combining four vowels that differed in inherent duration (/i/, /ε/, /i/, /e/) with two syllable-final consonants that differed in phonological voicing (/z/ and /s/), a distinction that is partially cued by vowel duration. Experiment 1 examined the effect of vowel identity, fricative identity, and contextual factors on vowel duration, voiced-frication duration, and voiceless-frication duration in speech production, and the potential effectiveness of these durational measures as classification cues. In Experiment 2, listeners identified the syllables after they had been excised from sentential context. Accuracy in recognizing /s/ varied with the inherent duration of the preceding vowel, with the number of errors increasing with inherent vowel duration. This suggests that listeners did not sufficiently account for the effect of vowel identity when interpreting vowel duration as a cue to syllable-final voicing. In Experiment 3, listeners heard the syllables in sentential context. Accuracy improved, and no relation was found between inherent vowel duration and accuracy in recognizing /s/. This indicated that the sentential context of a syllable conveys information that is useful to listeners in correctly determining the segmental basis of the internal temporal structure of a syllable
Acoustics · Audiology · Context (archaeology · Duration (music · Formant · Linguistics · Mid vowel · Relative articulation · Speech recognition · Syllable · Voice · Vowel · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Speech and Audio Processing
Effect of Duration on the Perception of Voicing
Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English
Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English
Preceding Vowel Duration as a Cue to the Perception of the Voicing Characteristic of Word-Final Consonants in American English
The devoicing of voiced fricatives
Coarticulation and theories of extrinsic timing
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |