Production and perception of vowel length in spoken sentences

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The accuracy with which vowel segment durations in spoken sentencs can be represented in auditory sensory storage and the extent to which phoneme boundaries in the identification of phonemic vowel length in Dutch are affected by syntactic and/or auditory-phonetic context were determined. Durations of both long and short Dutch vowel phonemes in monosyllabic words embedded in sentences are systematically affected by word positions in the sentences. Phoneme boundaries and slopes of identification curves were measured for 12 human listeners in 5 different test utterances in a binary forced choice identification test. Perceptual accuracy of vowel duration perception as determined from the slopes of the identification curves corresponds on the average to a just-noticeable difference (JND) of about 5 ms with a test segment duration of about 90 ms. Phoneme boundary values are systematically affected by context in ways predictable from syntactic structure and the auditory-phonetic environment. A major effect on phoneme boundary is brought about by perceived properties of the test utterance following the monosyllable containing the test segment. The difference between phoneme boundaries in utterance final syllable and in embedded syllable is related to the presence or absence of a perceived speech pause following that syllable. A simple decision model with a noisy auditory representation of embedded vowel duration, lasting a few hundredths of milliseconds, and a noiseless internal criterion for vowel length identification which is systematically affected by the auditory-phonetic environment were discussed.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: