Abstract
Recent research suggests that a set of acoustic properties are ambiguous with regard to their categorization as /b/ or /w/ depending on the duration of the following vowel [J. Miller and A. Liberman, Percept. Psychophys. 25, 457–465 (1979)]. Such evidence causes difficulty for a theory of acoustic invariance [S. Blumstein and K. N. Stevens, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 66, 1001–1017 (1981)], since identification of properties at the onset appears to be dependent on the context of later-occurring acoustic material. We repeated earlier experiments [J. Miller and A. Liberman, Percept. Psychophys. 25, 457–465 (1979)] with some variation. While maintaining continua of stimuli between /b/ and /w/, our stimuli were made more natural by manipulating the spectrum of voicing prior to consonant release. The consequence was weak prevoicing and an abrupt onset at the /b/ end, and stronger prevoicing and a gradual onset at the /w/ end. Results showed that the tendency for identification of mid-valued stimuli to be affected by the following vowel duration was reduced. These findings suggest that earlier results may be explained by the structure of the synthetic stimuli and by properties of auditory processing. [Work supported in part by NSF and by NINCDS.]
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