A critical look at commonly used stimuli in speech perception experiments

Abstract

Speech is an attractive stimulus to use for testing the auditory system because it is both highly relevant to everyday life and also replete with acoustic complexity that can test a variety of auditory skills. This presentation shines a light on some commonly used test stimuli or stimulus practices and raises questions about their use, or the interpretations of previous results. For example, the vowel acoustic data published by Hillenbrand et al. (1995) has been adopted as a de facto gold standard even though it was intended as a snapshot of a single dialect at a particular point in time. In that paper, the dynamics of vowel spectra were emphasized, though this aspect of vowels has been often overlooked. In consonant testing, the use of the /a/ context is pervasive, and yet this consonant environment is far from “neutral,” especially in situations where perception of voicing/voice onset time is measured. Perception of consonants and words will be examined with regard to their generalization to perception of longer utterances. Finally, we will examine the balance between convenience and generalizability, including strengths and weaknesses of closed-set speech stimuli.