Relative amplitude of aspiration noise as a voicing cue for syllable-initial stop consonants.
| Number | 280 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1979 |
| Drawer | 5 |
| Entry Date | 06/03/1999 |
| Authors | Repp, B. H. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Language and Speech, 22, 173-189. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0280.pdf |
| Abstract | Two experiments, each involving the listening judgments of 8 subjects, demonstrated that amplitude of aspiration noise (relative to the following periodic portion of the vowel) is a cue for the distinction between voiced & voiceless syllable-initial stop consonsants in English, & that it can be traded for voice onset time. In experiment 1, the category boundary on a synthetic voice onset time continuum (/da/ - /ta/) was found to be a linear function of the amplitude ratio between the aspirated & unaspirated vocalic portions over a 24 db range. A 1 db increase in the ratio led to a shortening of the voice onset time boundary by 0.43 milliseconds (msec), on the average. In experiment 2, the synthetic stimuli were prefixed with a natural 10 msec release burst, & burst & aspiration amplitudes were varied orthogonally. Both factors affected the voicing boundary in the expected direction but not independently; the interaction was ascribed to backward masking of weak bursts by strong aspiration noise. After accounting for this interaction, the effect of burst amplitude seemed very small compared to that of aspiration amplitude. Results suggest that the amount of aspiration noise is the primary voicing cue in the situation investigated, & that the perception of the noise follows psychoacoustic laws of time-intensity tradeoff. The methodological significance of amplitude parameters in speech synthesis is mentioned. |
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