Perceptual recovery of phonetic features in blanked segments of disyllabic words

Abstract

Spondees, both true disyllabic words and concatenated monosyllabic word pairs, had their middle section replaced by silence that extended from the midpoint of the first to the midpoint of the second vowel; the silence thus included the final consonant(s) of the first and the initial consonant(s) of the second syllable. These stimuli were presented to normal-hearing young listeners instructed to guess both monosyllabic half words. Input and response spondees were orthographically aligned and analyzed as confusion matrices. Articulatory gestures were estimated for each token via the Haskins Laboratories TADA articulatory synthesis. After time alignment, articulatory distances were calculated for each stimulus-response pair. In the blanked middle of the spondee, phoneme-based confusions of place-of-articulation were high (39% accuracy), while gestural distances underlying this feature (location and degree of tongue tip constriction, lip aperture, and velar constriction) were under 10%. These results suggest that acoustic traces of a significant portion of gesture trajectories underlying consonantal place-of-articulation that start before and/or terminate after the silence, are perceived by the listener. An articulatory phonology might thus be more robust to degradation. [Work supported by NSF, AFOSR, and the VA Medical Research.]