Haskins Publications

Number	149
Year	1973
Drawer	3
Entry Date	05/21/1998
Authors	Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Hadding, K.
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Publication	Language and Speech, 16, 293-313.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0149.pdf
Abstract	Systematically varied the fundamental-frequency contour of a 700-msec vocoded utterance, "November," to produce 72 contours, different in fundamental frequency at the stress and over the terminal glide. 22 Swedish and 16 American graduate and undergraduate students classified (a) speech and sine-wave contours as either terminally rising or terminally falling (psychophysical judgments) and (b) speech contours as questions or statements (linguistic judgments). For both groups, 2 factors acted in complementary relation to govern linguistic judgments: perceived terminal glide and fundamental frequency at the stress. Subjects tended to classify contours with an apparent terminal rise and/or high stress as questions and contours with an apparent terminal fall and/or low stress as statements. For both speech and sine waves, psychophysical judgments of terminal glide were influenced by earlier sections of the contour, but the effects were reduced for sine-wave contours, and there were several instances in which speech psychophysical judgments followed the linguistic more closely than the sine-wave judgments. It is suggested that these instances may reflect the control exerted by linguistic decision over perceived auditory shape.
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