Abstract
Several experiments investigate voicing judgments in minimal pairs likerabid-rapid when the duration of the first vowel and the medial stop are varied factorially and other cues for voicing remain ambiguous. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which synthetic labial and velar-stop voicing pairs are investigated, the perceptual boundary along a continuum of silent consonant durations varies in constant proportion to increases in the duration of the preceding vocalic interval. In Experiment 3, it is shown that speaking tempo external to the test word has far smaller effects on a closure duration boundary for voicing than does the tempo within the test word. Experiment 4 shows that, even within the word, it is primarily the preceding vowel that accounts for changes in the consonant duration effects. Furthermore, in Experiments 3 and 4, the effects of timing outside the vowel-consonant interval are independent of the duration of that interval itself. These findings suggest that consonant/vowel ratio serves as a primary acoustic cue for English voicing in syllable-final position and imply that this ratio possibly is directly extracted from the speech signal.
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Experiment 3 was reported at the 95th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, May 1978, at Providence, Rhode Island, and is described in Port (Note 1). In addition, some of these experiments were reported in an invited paper by the first author to the American Association of Phonetic Sciences in November 1980, at Los Angeles, California (Note 2). This research was supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grant R01-HD12511 and by Biomedical Research Support Grant S07-RR07031 to Indiana University.
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Port, R.F., Dalby, J. Consonant/vowel ratio as a cue for voicing in English. Perception & Psychophysics 32, 141–152 (1982). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03204273
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03204273