Abstract
When members of a series of synthesized stop consonants varying acoustically inF3 characteristics and varying perceptually from /da/ to /ga/ are preceded by /al/, subjects report hearing more /ga/ syllables relative to when each member is preceded by /ar/ (Mann, 1980). It has been suggested that this result demonstrates the existence of a mechanism that compensates for coarticulation via tacit knowledge of articulatory dynamics and constraints, or through perceptual recovery of vocal-tract dynamics. The present study was designed to assess the degree to which these perceptual effects are specific to qualities of human articulatory sources. In three experiments, series of consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli varying inF3-onset frequency (/da/—/ga/) were preceded by speech versions or nonspeech analogues of /al/ and lav I. The effect of liquid identity on stop consonant labeling remained when the preceding VC was produced by a female speaker and the CV syllable was modeled after a male speaker’s productions. Labeling boundaries also shifted when the CV was preceded by a sine wave glide modeled after F3 characteristics of /al/ and /ar/. Identifications shifted even when the preceding sine wave was of constant frequency equal to the offset frequency ofF3 from a natural production. These results suggest an explanation in terms of general auditory processes as opposed to recovery of or knowledge of specific articulatory dynamics.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bregman, A. S. (1981 ). Asking the “what for” question in auditory perception. In M. Kubovy & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.),Perceptual organization (pp. 99–118). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bregman, A. S. (1990).Auditory scene analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cathcart, E. P., &Dawson, S. (1928–1929). Persistence (2).British Journal of Psychology,19, 343–356.
Christman, R. J. (1954). Shifts in pitch as a function of prolonged stimulation with pure tones.American Journal of Psychology,67, 484–491.
Dainora, A., Hemphill, R., Hirata, Y., &Olson, K. (1996). Effects of context and speaking rate on liquid-stop sequences: A reassessment of traditional acoustic cues.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,100, 2601.
Delattre, P. C, Liberman, A. M., &Cooper, F. S. (1955). Acoustic loci and transitional cues for consonants.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,27, 769–773.
Deutsch, D. (1996). Paradoxical music.Echoes,6, pp. 1, 4–5.
Diehl, R. L., &Walsh, M. A. (1989). An auditory basis for the stimuluslength effect in the perception of stops and glides.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,85, 2154–2164.
Dooling, R. J., Best, C. T, &Brown, S. D. (1995). Discrimination of synthetic full-formant and sinewave /ra-la/ continua by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata).Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,97, 1839–1846.
Fant, G. (1966). A note on vocal tract size factors and non-uniform F-pattem scalings.Speech Transmission Laboratory Quarterly Progress and Status Report (No. 4, pp. 22–30). Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology.
Fant, G. (1975). Non-uniform vowel normalization.Speech Transmission Laboratory Quarterly Progress and Status Report (Nos. 2–3, pp. 1–19). Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology.
Fowler, C. A. (1984). Segmentation of coarticulated speech in perception.Perception & Psychophysics,36, 359–368.
Fowler, C. A. (1986). An event approach to the study of speech perception from a direct-realist perspective.Journal of Phonetics,14, 3–28.
Fowler, C. A., Best, C. T., &Mcroberts, G. W. (1990). Young infants’ perception of liquid coarticulatory influences on following stop consonants.Perception & Psychophysics,48, 559–570.
Fowler, C. A., &Smith, M. R. (1986). Speech perception as “vector analysis”: An approach to the problems of segmentation and invariance. In J. Perkell & D. Klatt (Eds.),Invariance and variability of speech processes (pp. 123–139). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gilchrist, A. L. (1977). Perceived lightness depends on perceived spatial arrangement.Science,195, 185–187.
Gogel, W. C. (1978). The adjacency principle in visual perception.Scientific American,238, 126–139.
Gordon, C, Webb, D. L., &Wolpert, S. (1992). One cannot hear the shape of a drum.Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,27, 134–138.
Green, K. P., Stevens, E. B., &Kuhl, P. K. (1994). Talker continuity and the use of rate information during phonetic perception.Perception & Psychophysics,55, 249–260.
Hartline, H. F., Ratliff, F., &Miller, W. H. (1961). Inhibitory interaction in the retina and its significance in vision. In E. Florey (Ed.),Nervous inhibition (pp. 241–284). New York: Pergamon.
Henton, C. G., &Bladon, R. A. W. (1985). Breathiness in normal female speech: Inefficiency versus desirability.Language & Communication,5, 221–227.
Holmberg, E. B., Hillman, R. E., &Perkell, J. S. (1988). Glottal air flow and pressure measurements for soft, normal and loud voice by male and female speakers.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,84, 511 -529.
Jamieson, D. J., Ramji, K. V., Kheirallah, I., &Nearey, T. M. (1992). CSRE: A speech research environment. In J. Ohala, T. Nearey, B. Derwing, M. Hodge, & G. Wiebe (Eds.),Proceedings ICSLP 92 (pp. 1127–1130). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta.
Johnson, K. (1989). Higher formant normalization results from auditory integration of F 2 and F3.Perception & Psychophysics,46, 174–180.
Kac, M. (1966). Can one hear the shape of a drum?American Mathematics Monthly,73, 1–23.
Kent, R. D., &Burkhard, R. (1981). Changes in the acoustic correlates of speech production. In D. S. Beasley & G. A. Davis (Eds),Aging: Communication processes and disorders (pp. 47-62). New York: Grune & Stratton.
Kent, R. D., &Minifie, F. D. (1977). Coarticulation in recent speech production models.Journal of Phonetics,5, 115–133.
Klatt, D. H. (1980). Software for a cascade/parallel formant synthesizer.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,67, 971–995.
Klatt, D. H., &Klatt, L. C. (1990). Analysis, synthesis, and perception of voice quality variations among female and male talkers.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,87, 820–857.
Kluender, K. R. (1991). Effects of first formant onset properties on voicing judgments result from processes not specific to humans.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,90, 83–96.
Kluender, K. R., &Lotto, A. J. (1994). Effects of first formant onset frequency on [-voice] judgments result from general auditory processes not specific to humans.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,9S, 1044–1052.
Kluender, K. R., & Lotto, A. J. (1997).Virtues and perils of an empiricist approach to speech perception. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Kuhl, P. K. (1978). Predispositions for the perception of speech-sound categories: A species-specific phenomena. In F. D. Minifie & L. L. Lloyd (Eds.),Communicative and cognitive abilities—early behavioral assessment (pp. 229–255). Baltimore: University Park Press.
Kuhl, P. K. (1986a). The special-mechanisms debate in speech research: Categorization tests on animals and infants. In S. Hamad (Ed.),Categorical perception (pp. 355–386). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kuhl, P. K. (1986b). Theoretical contributions of tests on animals to the special-mechanisms debate in speech.Experimental Biology,45, 233–265.
Kuhl, P. K., &Miller, J. D. (1975). Speech perception by the chinchilla: Voiced-voiceless distinction in alveolar plosive consonants.Science,190, 69–72.
Kuhl, P. K., &Miller, J. D. (1978). Speech perception by the chinchilla: Identification functions for synthetic VOT stimuli.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,63, 905–917.
Liberman, A. M., &Mattingly, I. G. (1985). The motor theory of speech perception revised.Cognition,21, 1–36.
Lotto, A. J., Green, K., &Kluender, K. R. (1993). Vowel continuity and perception of /ba-wa/.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,93, 2391–2392.
Lotto, A. J., Kluender, K. R., &Green, K. P. (1996). Spectral discontinuities and the vowel length effect.Perception & Psychophysics,58, 1005–1014.
Mann, V. A. (1980). Influence of preceding liquid on stop-consonant perception.Perception & Psychophysics,28, 407–412.
Mann, V. A. (1986). Distinguishing universal and language-dependent levels of speech perception: Evidence from Japanese listeners’ perception of English “1” and“r.”Cognition,24, 169–196.
Mann, V. A., &Liberman, A. M. (1983). Some differences between phonetic and auditory modes of perception.Cognition,14, 211–235.
Mcgowan, R. S. (1994). Recovering articulatory movement from formant frequency trajectories using task dynamics and a genetic algorithm: Preliminary model tests.Speech Communication,14, 19–48.
Mcgowan, R. S., &Rubin, P. E. (1994). Perceptual evaluation of articulatory movement recovered from acoustic data [Abstract].Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,96, 3328.
Mermelstein, P. (1973). Articulatory model for the study of speech production.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,53, 1070–1082.
Monsen, R. B., &Engebretson, A. M. (1977). Study of variations in the male and female glottal wave.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,62, 981–993.
Nearey, T. M. (1990). The segment as a unit of speech perception.Journal of Phonetics,18, 347–373.
Nearey, T. M. (1991). Perception: Automatic and cognitive processes. InProceedings of the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Vol. 1, pp. 40–49). Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence.
Nearey, T. M. (1992). Context effects in a double-weak theory of speech perception.Language & Speech,35, 153–172.
Nearey, T. M. (1995). Speech perception as pattern recognition [Abstract].Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,97, 3334.
Öhman, S. E. G. (1966). Coarticulation in VCV utterances: Spectrographic measurements.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,39, 151–168.
Parker, E. M. (1988). Auditory constraints on the perception of stop voicing: The influence of lower-tone frequency on judgments of toneonset simultaneity.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,83, 1597–1607.
Pisoni, D. B., Carrell, T. D., &Gans, S. J. (1983). Perception of the duration of rapid spectrum changes in speech and nonspeech signals.Perception & Psychophysics,34, 314–322.
Remez, R. E., Rubin, P. E., Berns, S. M., Pardo, J. S., &Lang, J. M. (1994). On the perceptual organization of speech.Psychological Review,101, 129–156.
Remez, R. E., Rubin, P. E., Pisoni, D. B., &Carrell, T. D. (1981). Speech perception without traditional speech cues.Science,212, 947–950.
Saltzman, E. (1986). Task-dynamic coordination of the speech articulators: A preliminary model.Experimental Brain Research,15, 129–144.
Saltzman, E., &Kelso, J. A. (1987). Skilled actions: A task-dynamic approach.Psychological Review,94, 84–106.
Schroeter, J., &Sondhi, M. M. (1992). Speech coding based on physiological models of speech production. In S. Furui & M. M. Sondhi (Eds.),Advances in speech signal processing (pp. 588–591). New York: Marcel Dekker.
Stathopoulos, E. T., &Sapienza, C (1993). Respiratory and laryngeal measures of children during vocal intensity variation.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,94, 2531–2543.
Stevens, K. N. (1960). Toward a model for speech recognition.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,32, 47–55.
Warren, R. M. (1985). Criterion shift rule and perceptual homeostasis.Psychological Review,92, 574–584.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work was supported by NIDCD Grant DC-00719 and NSF Young Investigator Award DBS-9258482 to the second author and by Sigma Xi Dissertation Research Award to the first author. Some of the data were presented at the spring meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, May 1994, in Cambridge, MA, and at the International Congress on Phonetic Sciences, August 1995, in Stockholm.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lotto, A.J., Kluender, K.R. General contrast effects in speech perception: Effect of preceding liquid on stop consonant identification. Perception & Psychophysics 60, 602–619 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206049
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206049