Perception of stop consonants with conflicting transitional cues: a cross-linguistic study.

Abstract

In vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) utterances, the place of articulation of the consonant is cued by formant transitions both out of the first vowel and into the second vowel. When the two transitions provide conflicting place cues, which dominates perception? The present experiment compared Japanese and American English listeners' perceptions of VCV stimuli in which the consonantal transitions conflicted. Conflicting transition stimuli were created from naturally produced Japanese disyllabic forms, with two accent patterns: low-high and high-low. Results of the experiment indicated that the transitions into a vowel generally outweigh the transitions out of a vowel. Further, this effect was found to be a function not of speech production factors, but rather of perceptual factors. In addition, Japanese and American English listeners responded differentially to the accent pattern of the stimuli. American English listeners showed a greater tendency to identify the intervocalic consonant according to the out-of-vowel transitions when the accent pattern was high-low than when the accent pattern was low-high. In contrast, Japanese listeners' judgments were unaffected by the accent pattern of the stimuli. The results are discussed with reference to differences in the linguistic function of VC transitions and to differences in syllable structure between the two languages.