Voice onset time as a cue for perceiving place of articulation in stop consonants

Abstract

It is well-established that the formant transitions are the cues to differentiate the perceived place of articulation (POA) of a stop consonant, regardless of voice onset time (VOT). However, as shown in the acoustic analysis of utterances, it is also documented that stop consonants with different POAs have distinguished VOTs, in English and other languages. Moreover, various models have been proposed to explain the covariation between POA and VOT. Given that there is a correlation between these two, it is possible that VOT also serves as a cue for perceiving POA in addition to formant transitions, and that POA affects the judgment of VOT in addition to temporal cues. Previous research addressed the role of POA in distinguishing voicing contrasts, but the effect of VOT on perceiving POA has not been reported in previous literature. By varying the VOTs of bilabial, alveolar, and velar stops, the current study shows that VOT is also an important cue in distinguishing POA. The results are not consistent with a one-to-one mapping between specific phonetic cues and articulatory gestures, but support a statistical learning of multiple phonetic features in phonemes.