Some effects of filtered contexts on the perception of vowels and fricatives.

Abstract

When a phrase is filtered to simulate the effects of a transmission channel, a vowel played shortly afterward is heard as if there is perceptual compensation for the filter. However, a transmission channel would also have an effect on sounds that arrive after the vowel. The present experiments ask whether vowel test sounds are affected by the filtering of a subsequent affricate when there are no other sounds present. Effects on other types of test sounds from different subsequent sounds are measured as well. The experiments also ask whether these effects occur when there is information about the channel in a precursor phrase. Listeners identified words from continua between /It integral of/ and /epsilon t integral of/, /aept/ and /[symbol: see text]/, or /[symbol: see text]/ and /[symbol: see text]/. Filters' frequency responses were the difference of spectral envelopes from the end-point test sounds. The perceptual midpoints of all the continua were shifted in a manner consistent with compensation when the precursors were filtered, as well as when sounds subsequent to the test sound were filtered and there were no precursors. Also, when filtered precursors were present, the shifts increased when filtering was added to sounds subsequent to the test sound. These results indicate that mechanisms of perceptual compensation for filtering by transmission channels use information in preceding sounds in combination with information in following sounds and that these mechanisms operate between different types of speech sounds.