Some relations between duration of silence and duration of friction noise as joint cues for fricatives, affricates, and stops

Abstract

As is well known, introducing a short interval of silence between the words SAY and SHOP causes the listener to hear SAY CHOP. In isolation, SHOP may be turned into CHOP by reducing the duration of the friction noise. Now, varying both cues orthogonally in a sentence context, we find that, within limits, they are perceived in relation to each other: The shorter the duration of the noise, the shorter the silence necessary to convert the fricatives into an affricate. On the other hand, when the rate of articulation of the sentence frame is increased while holding noise duration constant, a longer silent interval is needed to hear an affricate, as if the noise duration, but not the silence duration, were subjectively longer in the faster sentence. In a separate experiment, varying noise and silence durations in GRAY SHIP, we find that, given sufficent silence, listeners report GRAY CHIP when the noise is short, but GREAT SHIP when it is long. Thus, the long noise in the second syllable disposes the listeners to displace the stop to the first syllable, so that they hear not a syllable-initial affricate (i.e., stop-initiated fricative) but a syllable-final stop (followed by a syllable-initial fricative). [Work supported by NICHD.]