Haskins Publications

Number	316
Year	1980
Drawer	6
Entry Date	06/15/1999
Authors	Raphael, L., Dorman, M., & Liberman, A.
Contact
Publication	Language and Speech, 23, 297-308.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0316.pdf
Abstract	Most investigations of the perceptual relevance of vowel duration have employed patterns of synthetic speech in which only the steady-state portions of syllables have been used as the variable. Two experiments (N = 11, 15) were designed to discover if cons-vowel transitions are also included by the listener in determining the effective duration of the "vowel," ie, they measured the contribution of the syllable-initial formant transitions to that vowel duration on which the voicing of a stop in syllable-final position can be made to depend. It was shown that the syllable-initial transitions contribute to that duration: they appear to contribute to the same degree as an equal duration of steady-state. Apparently, effective vowel duration extends over all parts of the acoustic signal influenced by it, including the transition that reflect the consequences of the coarticulation of vowel & cons.
Notes