Haskins Publications

Number	447
Year	1984
Drawer	8
Entry Date	11/19/1999
Authors	Rakerd, B.
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Publication	Perception & Psychophysics, 35, 123-136.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0447.pdf
Abstract	Two experiments, with 23 paid volunteers and 27 undergraduates, examined whether the presence of neighboring consonants can exert a contextual influence on vowel perception. Subjects were asked to judge the linguistic similarity relationships that held among a set of American English vowels when those vowels occurred either in isolation, or in /dVd/ consonantal context. In Experiment I, judgments were made in response to recordings of natural speech. In Experiment II, they were made for Subjects' memorial images of vowels as elicited by written stimuli. Individual differences scaling of the outcomes of the 2 experiments provided evidence in support of the following conclusions: (1) Consonantal context can significantly influence vowel perceptions. (2) For the /dVd/ context at least, the nature of the influence is to evoke more linguistic perceptual processing of vowels than occurs when they are presented in isolation. (3) The influence is more likely to be explained in terms of properties of the stimuli presented to perceivers than in terms of any sort of knowledge that perceivers bring to bear in perceptual processing. (4) Three features of linguistic description for vowels--advancement, height, and tenseness--have particular import for vowel perception and for vowel memory.
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