Acoustic modeling of the perception of place information in incomplete stops

Abstract

Previous research on stop consonant production found that less than 60% of the stops sampled from a connected speech corpus contained a clearly defined hold duration followed by a plosive release [Crystal & House, JASA 1988]. How listeners perceive the remaining portion of incomplete stop consonants is not well understood. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether relative formant deflection patterns, a potential model of acoustic invariance proposed by Story and Bunton (2010), is capable of predicting listeners’ perceptions of acoustically continuous, voiced stop consonants lacking a canonical hold duration. Listeners were randomly presented a total of 60 voiced stop-consonant VCV stimuli, each 100 ms in duration, synthesized using a computational model of speech production. Stimuli were created using a continuum of 20 equal step constrictions along the length of the vocal tract in three vowel-to-vowel contexts [see Story & Bunton, JSLHR 2010]. Participants listened to the stimuli and performed a forced choice test (i.e., /b-d-g/). The phonetic boundaries predicted by the relative formant deflection patterns and phonetic boundaries obtained by the forced choice test were compared to determine the ability of the acoustic model to predict participants’ perceptions. The acoustic and perceptual results are reported. [Work supported by NIH R01-DC011275.]