Identification and Discrimination of a Phonemic Contrast Induced by Silent Interval

Abstract

At a previous meeting of this Society we described research which indicated that the insertion of silent intervals into recordings of natural productions of certain fricative-vowel sequences is sufficient to induce the perception of stops. For example, introducing a sufficiently long silent interval after /s/ in a production of sore causes the listener to hear store. Further research is presented on the perception of such intervals in the contrast between slit and split. Stimuli containing various durations of silent interval were presented to subjects for (phonemic) identification as slit or split. The same stimuli were presented also for forced-choice discrimination on the basis of any differences the subjects could hear. A comparison of the results indicated that discrimination is most acute in the region of the phoneme boundary. Analysis of the data showed that accuracy of discrimination was determined almost entirely by whether or not the sounds in a given comparison were perceived as different phonemes. Thus, the perception of this acoustic continuum can be regarded as essentially categorical. These results are comparable to those obtained in other studies of consonant perception. The categorical perception of the consonants may be explicable in terms of the categorical nature of their articulatory gestures.