Perception of distributed coarticulatory properties of English /l/ and /r/

Abstract

This paper investigates the salience of long-range coarticulatory effects in speech perception. English /l/ and /r/ have secondary articulations, resulting in resonances, which have been claimed to extend over several syllables and to have a domain larger than the phonological foot. For example, “a belly” differs from “a berry” not only in the liquid but also in the qualities of all three vowels. A progressive replacement experiment was conducted to test whether this type of distributed coarticulatory information is available to listeners in speech perception. It was found that subjects could correctly identify whether a word contained /l/ or /r/ even when the approximant and some surrounding vowels and consonants are replaced by noise. The experiment supports observations of the extent of secondary articulations, and provides reliable evidence that long-domain coarticulatory information about the /l/-/r/ distinction is perceptually available to listeners. While the specific phonetic nature of the long-range effects in this study is not clear, there are some candidate phenomena (such as F2of the surrounding context) that merit further study.