Perception of word‐final voicing in two sentence contexts

Abstract

Stressed syllables produced before major syntactic boundaries typically exhibit a marked lengthening, suggesting that listeners may have expectations regarding the relative length of syllables occurring immediately before a major syntactic boundary. We investigated the possible consequences of such expectations for the perception of word‐final stop voicing, which may be cued by vowel and/or closure duration. We examined labeling performance for two continua of synthetic stop‐vowel‐stop words varying in vowel and closure duration. These continua were embedded in synthetic, monotone sentences in which the target stimuli occurred either at the end of an initial subordinate clause or one word before a clause boundary. For half of stimuli, a pause occurred at the boundary; for the other half, no pause occurred. Expectation of phrase‐final lengthening produced a large effect on labeling performance, but only when a pause occurred at the clause boundary. The implications of these findings for perception of voicing as a function of syntactic and phonetic context will be discussed. [Supported by NIH grant no. NS‐12179 to Indiana University.]