Abstract
A set of 10 nasal-stop vowel syllables were constructed on a Glace-Holmes synthesizer; nasality was cued by a single nasal resonance at a center frequency of 265 Hz. Syllables differed in transitions of second and third speech formants over a range sufficient to produce the perception of /mæ/, /næ/, and /ŋæ/. Sixteen subjects were tested on identification and oddity discrimination of these stimuli presented both forward (CV) and backward (VC). Identification functions showed sharp boundaries between phonemic categories for seven subjects in the CV condition and 14 subjects in the VC condition. In general, discrimination was closely related to identification for individual subjects; that is, discrimination tended to be categorical. Discrimination functions revealed more accurate performance for the VC stimuli than for the CV stimuli for most subjects. In particular, the VC discrimination functions for 11 subjects showed a peak between the stimuli identified as /æn/ and /æŋ/, while the comparable CV functions showed no such peak between /næ/ and /ŋæ/. Three of the other five subjects showed equally accurate discrimination of both CV and VC stimuli. These results suggest that discriminability of a phonemic distinction is sensitive to the particular syllabic position in which the distinction occurs in the language.
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