Haskins Publications

Number	567
Year	1987
Drawer	10
Entry Date	11/17/1999
Authors	Remez, R. E., Rubin, P. E., Nygaard, L. C., & Howell, W. A.
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Publication	Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Vol. 13, No. 1, 40-61.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0567.pdf
Abstract	If listeners treat sinusoidal signals as speech signals however unlike speech they may be, then perception should exhibit the common place sensitivity to the dimensions of the originating vocal tract. The present study, employing sinusoidal signals, raised this issue by testing the identification of target /bVt/, or b-vowel-t, syllables occurring in sentences that differed in the range of frequency variation of their component tones. Vowel quality of target syllables was influenced by this acoustic correlate of vocal-tract scale, implying that the perception of these nonvocal signals includes a process of vocal-tract normalization. Converging evidence suggests that the perception of sinusoidal vowels depends on the relations among component tones and not on the phonetic likeness of each tone in isolation. The findings support the general claim that sinusoidal replicas of natural speech signals are perceptible phonetically because they preserve time-varying information present in natural signals.
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