The role of voice onset time in the perception of English voicing contrasts in children’s speech

Abstract

The perception of phonemic voicing distinctions is typically attributed mainly to voice onset time (VOT). Most previous research focusing on voicing discrimination used synthetic speech stimuli varying in VOT. Results of this work suggest that adult listeners show stable crossover boundaries in the 20-35 ms range. However, no research has evaluated how VOT values correspond to adult labeling regardless of whether the intended target is voiced or voiceless. The present study obtained adult labeling data for natural productions of bilabial and alveolar pairs produced by 2-3-year-old monolingual, English-speaking children. Randomized stimuli were presented twice to 20 listeners resulting in 5,760 rated stimuli. Stimuli were categorized as short VOT ( 35 ms). The findings show that listeners demonstrated the greatest accuracy for bilabials (>99%) and alveolars (>92%) when the target matched the expected VOT duration (i.e., doe → short lag and toe → long lag). As...