Influence of context and rate of speech on stop–consonant recognition

Abstract

The effects of speaking rate and of contextual (with carrier phrase) and “isolated” (carrier phrase eliminated) methods of stimulus presentation on word-initial stop-consonant recognition were studied for 30 young adult listeners. Meaningful words and electronically modified subsegments were used to assess their relative contributions to consonant recognition as a function of varying speaking rate and context conditions. Generally, listener performance was exceptionally high for all conditions. However, subject’s performance indicated that the presence of a carrier phrase significantly facilitated target-word identification. Rate of speech had no significant main effect on recognition performance even though considerable change in transition length was evidenced for both non-moderate rate speaking conditions. But, for the target word “omit” condition, rate of speech was observed to influence the stability of the across-word boundary VC transitional cue more so than the within-word CV transition cue. It was also found that within-word CV transitional information was more perceptually potent than across-word boundary transitions. The findings suggest that the cue strengths of phonetic segments associated with consonant perception change as a function of context–rate interaction.