Are vowels in context really identified better than vowels in isolation?

Abstract

Strange, Verbrugge, Shankweiler, and Edman [“Consonant environment specifies vowel identity.” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 60, 213–224 (1976)] reported that naive listeners misidentified approximately three times as many tokens of vowels spoken in isolation as the corresponding vowels in consonantal context. On the basis of these findings, they argue that the superior intelligibility of vowels in consonantal context is due to the fact that formant transitions, traditionally regarded as providing information about consonant identity, also provide perceptually significant information about vowel identity. The present study tested naive listeners identification of eleven American English vowels spoken in isolation and in consonantal context with an experimental design comparable to that used By Strange et al. Here, however, problems with the interpretation of orthographic symbols used to represent English vowels were minimized by having listeners identify the syllables by rhyming them with English words. The results of the rhyming test indicated that vowels in both contexts were identified with near-perfect (98%) accuracy. Further, the test did not reveal any difference in identifiability between the two vowel contexts.