Vowels in consonantal context are perceived more linguistically than are isolated vowels: Evidence from an individual differences scaling study.

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether the presence of neighboring consonants can exert a contextual influence on vowel perception and, if so, to characterize the influence. Two experiments were carried out toward that end. In both, subjects were asked to judge the linguistic similarity relationships that held among a set of American English vowels when those vowels occurred either: (1) in isolation, or (2) in /dVd/ consonantal context. In Experiment 1, the judgments were made in response to recordings of natural speech. In Experiment 2, they were made for subjects’ memorial images of vowels as elicited by written stimuli. Individual differences scaling of the outcomes of the two experiments provided evidence that supported the following conclusions: (1) Consonantal context can significantly influence vowel perception; (2) for the /dVd/ context at least, the nature of the influence is to evoke more linguistic perceptual processing of vowels than occurs when they are presented in isolation; (3) the influence is more likely to be explained in terms of properties of the stimuli presented to perceivers than in terms of any sort of knowledge that perceivers bring to bear in perceptual processing; and (4) three features of linguistic description for vowels—advancement, height, and tenseness—have particular import for vowel perception and for vowel memory.