Categorical perception of synthetic vowels in /d/‐vowel‐/d/ context and in isolation

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Identification and discrimination experiments using series of isolated vowels have shown that these vowels, unlike many consonant series, are not perceived categorically. Recent studies, however, suggest that naturally spoken isolated vowels are identified less reliably than vowels in context. In this study three series of synthetic three‐formant syllables varying in ten steps from /I/ to /ε/ or /dId/to /dεd/ were constructed to investigate the following questions: (1) Are vowels in syllable context perceived in a more categorical manner than isolated vowels of similar length? (2) Are isolated vowels of short duration perceived in a more categorical manner than vowels of longer duration? (3) To what extent are the identification and discrimination of isolated vowels of short duration comparable to that of vowels in syllable context? Perception was investigated using standard identification and oddity discrimination procedures. Further investigations are planned using unbiased measures of discrimination. [Supported by grants from NICHD and NIMH.]