The role of acoustic properties in the recognition of nasal and liquid Spanish consonants

Abstract

The present study tested, in experiment I, the relevance of nasal and liquid portions [m, n, r, I, rr] gated out from CV and CVC syllables with vowels [i, e, a, o, u]. The consonantal portions were gated out of the syllables using a general purpose computer program—AUDITS—in a PDP9 computer at the Research Laboratory of Electronics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The split segments were recorded in separate tapes and presented for identification under two conditions: free and forced‐choice. Results showed that: (a) the condition employed influenced listeners responses; (b) [r] is the sound less identified, the transition being an important cue for its recognition; (c) the nasal murmur provides cues for manner identification; (d) the [l] portion indicates the presence of a cue place; and (e) [rr] is better identified in initial position. In experiment II, nasal sounds were gated out from Spanish words using the same experimental procedure as in experiment I. The word is correctly identified when the same sound sequence does not conform another Spanish word.