Fricative and plosive perception-identification as a function of phonetic context in CVCVC utterance.

Abstract

Hypothesis: The largest perceptual influence unit (PIU) for consonant perception-identification is of larger than syllable size and at least of the size CVCVC. The PIU is defined as that number of two or more successive speech sounds which influence the perception-identification of a given sound within that sequence. Each of twenty listeners attempted to identify the centrally occurring consonant /p t k b d g f s ∫ v z / in each of 576 CVCVC nonsense utterances occurring in white noise. The vowel context included combinations of /i α u/ while the outside consonants were both either /θ/ or /m/. Results indicated that plosive and non-sibilant fricative intelligibility varied significantly as a function of trans-consonantal vowel interaction (V C V). Furthermore trans-vowel consonant influence (C V C and/or C V C) significantly affected the intelligibility of almost all of the stimulus sounds. This latter finding, considered together with the former, clearly supports the proposed hypothesis.