Effects of speaking rate on the perception of syllable-initial stop consonants

Abstract

It has been shown that the effect of speaking rate on the perception of voice onset time (VOT) is strongest in the immediate vicinity of the target stop consonant: Listeners interpret a given VOT value in accordance with the duration of the CV syllable containing the stop consonant [A. Q. Summerfield, J. Exp. Psychol. Human Percept. Perform. 7, 1074–1095 (1981); J. L. Miller et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 76, S89 (1984)]. These studies used stimuli that are unlikely to occur in natural speech. The first study used simplified synthetic VOT continua; the second study used computer-edited natural-speech VOT continua, but in which syllable duration was kept constant, so that vowel duration decreased as VOT increased. The present study explored the effects of speaking rate on the perception of syllable-initial stop consonants in more natural circumstances. Natural-speech [bi-pi] continua were constructed, in which vowel rather than syllable duration was kept constant. Preliminary results indicate that the phoneme boundary is not, or only minimally, affected by changes in vowel duration.