Compensation for talker variability and vowel variability in the perception of fricatives

Abstract

In the perception of a fricative continuum from [s] to [∫], hearers are influenced both by rounding of a following vowel and by the gender of the talker. The experiment reported in this paper replicates and extends this finding. Subjects identified the initial fricative in CV syllables composed of synthetic fricatives from an [s]‐[∫] continuum and natural productions of either [a] or [u]. A male and female talker produced the vowels. Vowel rounding produced a shift in the [s]‐[∫] boundary both when syllables containing different vowels were randomly intermixed with each other and when the syllables were blocked by a vowel. However, the influence of talker gender was only present when the two talkers' productions were intermixed with each other. When syllables were blocked by the talker, no boundary shift occurred. Reaction time data had the same pattern for both sets of stimuli. Reaction time was longer when syllables with vowel or speaker differences were randomly intermixed. The boundary shift data suggest that the perceptual differences between talkers are enhanced when tokens are intermixed with each other, and generally that talker characteristics have a less robust effect on perceptual processing than do the properties of contextual segments. [Work supported by NIH Training Grant No. NS‐07134‐11 to Indiana University.]