Perception Of Consonant Voicing Research Articles

Canadian raising and the perception of consonant voicing

Studies have shown that monophthongal VC sequences with higher F1 and shorter durations result in more [-voice] consonant responses than those with lower F1 and longer durations [Moreton, E. 2004 J. Phon. 32(1), 1, Nearey, T. M. 1997, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., 101(6), 3241]. However, certain diphthongs in varieties of English with Canadian Raising show the opposite pattern, namely that before C[+voice], /aɪ/ diphthongs will have higher F1 in the nucleus than before C[-voice]. This study will investigate the interaction of interpretations of vowel tokens as monophthongs or diphthongs on the perception of the voicing of the following consonant. Measurements will be made from the speech of 10-20 speakers of Canadian English from the Edmonton area to be used in the resynthesis of hVd and hVt tokens. This will involve construction of a multi-dimensional continuum varying F1 values of the vowel nucleus as well as vowel duration and trajectory from nucleus to offglide. The resulting continuum will span both the four phonetic vowel categories [^, a, ^ɪ, aɪ] (where [^ɪ] and [aɪ] are viewed as allophones of a single phoneme /aɪ ), and also the final consonants /t/ and /d/.

Divergent patterns of voicing perception in various challenging listening conditions.

Perception of consonant voicing is especially robust, even under conditions of harsh spectral degradation, hearing loss, and background noise. Considering the limitations and variability of the acoustic input, it is unlikely that the same perceptual strategy is used in all situations. A sequence of experiments was designed to assess the weighting of multiple acoustic cues to the voicing contrast word‐initially and word‐finally, and to reveal patterns unavailable in conventional confusion matrices and information transfer analysis. In preliminary results, the combination of background noise and low‐pass filtering brought about a dramatic shift in weighting of the VOT and F0 cues for initial consonants; these degradations in isolation did not produce such a shift. Under conditions of spectral degradation (noise‐band vocoding), listeners significantly increased their use of vowel duration, and significantly decreased their use of vowel formant transition, which is dominant in the optimal condition. These results suggest that in challenging conditions, listeners are apt to use secondary acoustic cues that are potentially less reliable or less perceptually salient than primary cues used in optimal conditions. It is concluded that comparison of performances by listeners in various conditions should be guarded, even when recognition scores appear to be equivalent on the surface.