Identification of “hybrid” vowels in sentence context

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that listeners can identify the intended vowel in a CVC syllable even when the vowel nucleus has been attenuated to silence, leaving only onglides and offglides (silent center syllables). Verbrugge and Rakerd [Lang. Speech 29, 39–57 (1986)] constructed “hybrid” silent center syllables by cross splicing onglides and offglides of citation‐form CVC syllables spoken by a male and a female talker such that formant trajectories were discontinuous. Identification of the intended vowel in hybrid syllables was no less accurate than vowel identification of the single‐talker silent center syllables. The present study replicates this research with syllables spoken in a carrier sentence, “I say the word /dVd/ some more,” using ten American‐English vowels. Hybrid silent center syllables were prepared by crossing the stimulus sentences so that the sentence started with one talker and switched to the other after the silent portion of the test syllable. Silent center stimuli were prepared for each talker separately as controls. Vowel identification was as accurate in the hybrid condition as in the control conditions suggesting that dynamic syllable structure provides talker‐independent information about the articulatory/acoustic event. [Research supported by NINCDS.]