Vowel duration and closure duration in voiced and unvoiced stops: there are no contrast effects here.
| Number | 791 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1992 |
| Drawer | 14 |
| Entry Date | 11/05/1999 |
| Authors | Fowler, C. A. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Journal of Phonetics, 20, 143-165. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0791.pdf |
| Abstract | The experiments test directly a claim in the literature [Kluender, Diehl & Wright, Journal of Phonetics (1988), 16, 153-169] that the generally inverse relationship between durations of vowels and of closures for following voiced and voiceless obstruents occurs because language communities exploit and ostensible property of the auditory system indentified as “auditory durational contrast”. In this account, the long vowel before voiced, as compared to voiceless, consonants makes their already short closures sound even shorter than they are, thereby enhancing the perceptual distinctiveness of voiced and voiceless obstruents. The first experiment of the present series shows that contrast does not affect judgments either of closure durations or of vowel durations in VCV synthetic-speech disyllables. To the contrary, long vowels are associated with increased judgments that a closure is long, and, compatibly, long closures are associated with increased judgments that a vowel is long. A second experiment fails to replicate findings by Kluender et al. showing that classification judgments of non-speech square-wave VCV analogs varying in the duration of the first (vowel-like) tone and in the duration of the (consonant-like) gap between tone pairs exhibit durational contrast. Judgments of these signals, like judgments of VCVs themselves, show assimilation, rather than contrast, effects. Whatever the reason may be for vowel durations and closure durations to vary inversely in voiced and voiceless obstruents, it is not because language communities are exploiting durational contrast in the auditory system. For stimuli in these durational ranges and with these acoustic charateristics, there is no durational contrast effect to exploit. Moreover, if the assimilation effects that durational judgements did exhibit do, in fact, reflect distorting properties of the auditory system for signals such as VCVs, language communities are evidently snubbing those properties entirely in settling on durational properties of vowels before voiced and voiceless obstruents. |
| Notes |
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