Further experiments in the perception of French plosives.

Abstract

The present paper is a continuation of a previous study, in which several cues in French stop consonant perception were investigated. In a first series of experiments, identification of a stop as fortis versus lenis turned out to be influenced by whether the following consonant was a fricative or a plosive. Taking the results of this first series as a point of departure, the next experiment focussed on the possible masking influence of friction noise on the perception of a preceding stop. This hypothesis, however, was not confirmed by the outcome of the experiment. Two further experiments showed that periodicity in a stop plus stop cluster is assigned to the first or the second stop, depending on its position in the cluster, even when the first stop is not released. The general discussion places the results within a general frame of consonant perception in French.