Abstract
This study investigated the perceptual effects of misarticulating the English front vowels /i,ɪ,e,ε,æ/ located in two‐syllable target words. Subjects were instructed to shadow a taped prose passage containing the misarticulated target words. All misarticulations occurred along the height dimension, in reference to the traditional vowel quadrilateral. Also, all misarticulations involved the stressed vowel of each two‐syllable target word. The subjects tended to repeat words containing the vowel misarticulations as heard on the tape, instead of restoring the target words to their original form, indicating that the articulatory changes were noticeable to the subjects. If the changes were not noticeable, a greater number of restoration responses would have occurred. Subjects appeared to rely more on the acoustic‐phonetic properties of the misarticulated vowels than on the contextual constraints of the passage. Since vowels are more intense and greater in duration than consonants, it is possible that listeners utilized stressed vowel information as a perceptual anchor during word recognition. That is, stressed vowel information may guide a listener during word recognition. [Work supported by the Axe‐Houghton Foundation, New York.]
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