Haskins Publications

Number	661
Year	1989
Drawer	12
Entry Date	11/15/1999
Authors	Repp, R. H., & Lin, H.
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Publication	Perception & Psychophysics, 45 (4), 323-332.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0661.pdf
Abstract	When discriminating pairs of speech stimuli from an acoustic voice onset time (VOT) continuum, English-speaking Subjects show a performance peak in the region of the phonemic category boundary. This category boundary effect is reduced or eliminated when the stimuli are preceded by /s/. Data from 61 undergraduates in 5 experiments suggest that this suppression is not due to the absence of a phonological voicing contrast for stop consonants following /s/, since it is also obtained when the /s/ terminates a preceding word and when broadband noise is substituted for the fricative noise. Suppression was stronger, however, when the noise had the acoustic properties of a syllable-initial /s/. It is hypothesized that these properties make the noise cohere with the following speech signal, which makes it difficult for listeners to focus on the VOT differences to be discriminated.
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