The effect of variation in naturalness on phonetic perceptual identification

Abstract

The relation between apparent naturalness and phonetic identification was assessed in six perceptual tests. A seven-step place-of-articulation series spanning [da] to [ga] was created with speech synthesis approximating the spectra of natural samples. The sensitivity of perceivers to this realization of a place contrast was assessed by estimating the cumulative d′ across the series in identification tests. Four variants of this series differing in apparent naturalness were produced by altering the synthesis source function while preserving the center frequency and bandwidth of the formants, and by replicating the gross spectrotemporal patterns with time-varying sinusoids. In addition to calibrating perceivers’ sensitivity to the place contrast over variation in naturalness, we conducted a naturalness tournament composed of items drawn from the five test series. A correlation of the findings of the naturalness tournament with the measures of phonetic sensitivity offers an index of the effect of variation in naturalness on phonetic perception. This study can resolve the dispute between the classic premise that intelligibility and naturalness are orthogonal attributes of speech perception, and the more recent premise entailed by episodically based accounts of perceptual categorization, that novel instances are identified by virtue of auditory similarity to prior exemplars. [Research supported by NIDCD.]