Abstract
This study investigated the importance of three kinds of acoustic information for the perception of American English monophthongs: steady-state frequencies, formant transitions, and syllabic duration. B + Vowel + B syllables containing nine vowels spoken by a male talker were digitized and modified to produce six sets of stimuli: (1) tokens in which the center “vowel” portion of each syllable was deleted, (2) center portions of each syllable, with initial and final portions deleted, (3) initial transitional portions presented alone, (4) final transitional portions (plus releases) presented alone, (5) syllables in which the center was deleted and the initial and final portions were temporally abutted, and (6) unmodified syllable controls. Results of identification tests with independent groups of naive listeners showed that identification of vowels in condition 1 (the “vowel-less” syllables) was just as accurate as identification of controls. Error rates in condition 2 were intermediate; errors in conditions 3, 4, and 5 were much greater than controls. These results indicate that vowel identity is specified acoustically by dynamic information (transitions and duration) available in the syllable pattern as a whole. [Supported by NIMH.]
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