Some relationships between articulation and perception

Abstract

EMG studies of the American English vowel pairs /i‐ɪ/ and /e‐ε/ reveal two different production strategies: some speakers appear to differentiate the members of each pair primarily on the basis of tongue height; for others the basis of differentiation appears to be tongue tension. To determine if these production differences correspond to perception differences, two vowel identification tests were given to the EMG subjects. Subjects were asked to label the members of a seven‐step vowel continuum, /i/ through /ɪ/. In one test each item had an equal probability of occurrence. The other was an anchoring test: the first stimulus, /i/, was heard four times as often as any other. Compared with the equal‐probability test labelling boundary, the boundary in the unequal‐probability test was displaced toward the anchor stimulus. However, the magnitude of the shift was greater for subjects using a production strategy based on tongue height than for subjects using tongue tension to differentiate the vowels. [This work was supported by NIH Grants NS‐13617, NS‐05332, HD‐01994, and RR‐05596 to Haskins Laboratories; and SUNY Research Foundation.]