Identification of stop consonants from continuous speech in limited context

Abstract

This paper describes a series of perceptual experiments aimed at evaluating listeners' ability to identify singleton stop consonants. The stimuli consisted of portions of speech extracted from a corpus of about 3600 sentences spoken by over 4.50 talkers. A variety of factors, such as the stress pattern, syllable position, and phonemic environment, were systematically varied to determine the extent to which these factors influence the listeners' decision. At least 20 listeners heard syllable‐initial stops in one task and nonsyllable‐initial stops in another. In each task, only the immediate surrounding context was available. Overall identification rates were better than 97% for syllable‐initial stops and 85% for the noninitial stops. In the syllable‐initial case, 75% of the errors were in voicing, predominantly voiced stops being heard as their voiceless counterparts. For the noninitial stops, 88% of the errors were also in voicing. However, in this task, most of the errors were voiceless stops heard as voiced. Almost 70% of the errors for the noninitial stops involved alveolars, whereas no particular place of articulation accounted for most of the errors for the initial stops. Factors other than syllable position will also be discussed, and comparisons will be made to other stop identification studies. [Work supported by DARPA under contract N00014‐82‐K‐0727, monitored through the Office of Naval Research.]