Abstract
In Australian English rimes, coarticulation between coda /l/ and its preceding vowel has the potential to attenuate cues that contribute to phonological vowel contrast. Therefore, vowel-/l/ coarticulation may increase ambiguity between prelateral vowels. We used a vowel identification task to test the effect of vowel-/l/ coarticulation on vowel disambiguation in perception. Listeners categorized vowels in /hVd/ and /hVl/ contexts. Results showed reduced accuracy of vowels before coda /l/ compared to coda /d/, showing that coda /l/ increases vowel disambiguation difficulty. In particular, reduced perceptual contrast was found for the rime pairs /ʉːl-ʊl, æɔl-æl/ and /əʉl-ɔl/ (e.g., fool-full, howl-Hal, dole-doll). A second experiment tested the effect of reduced perceptual contrast on word recognition. Listeners identified minimal pairs contrasting key vowel pairs in the /CVl/ and /CVd/ contexts. Reduced accuracy and increased response time in /l/ contexts shows that coda /l/ hinders listeners’ ability to identify vowels. The implications of reduced perceptual vowel contrast for compensation for coarticulation and sound change are discussed.
Highlights
A fundamental issue in speech perception is how fine and varied phonetic details affect the identification and categorization of speech into higher-level units
The lack of significant Vowel effects on accuracy is probably due to the fact that participans were at ceiling in the /d/ condition, there was no variation between target Vowels in the /d/ condition
In Experiment 1, we found reduced perceptual contrast between the vowel-pairs /ʉ-ʊ, æɔ-æ, əʉ-ɔ/ which we attribute to the ambiguity of the acoustic signal
Summary
A fundamental issue in speech perception is how fine and varied phonetic details affect the identification and categorization of speech into higher-level units. Several studies have examined how the coarticulatory effects of nasal consonants on vowels are perceived in English (e.g., Beddor & Strange, 1982; Beddor, 2009; Beddor et al, 2013; Zellou, 2017) These studies found that on the one hand, listeners can perceive fine-grained phonetic details, as they can differentiate between oral and nasal vowels, and between degrees of nasalization (Beddor & Strange, 1982; Beddor et al, 2013). Listeners can compensate for the coarticulatory influence of nasals by attributing vowel nasalization to its consonantal source This ensures that nasal coarticulation does not hamper vowel perception (Beddor, 2009; Beddor et al, 2013; Zellou, 2017). English does not have a phonemic contrast between oral and nasal vowels, and a nasalized vowel typically only appears in a predictable pre-nasal or
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