Leigh Lisker
Haskins Labs., 270 Crown St., New Haven, CT 06511-6695 and Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104)
At the last ASA meeting it was shown that for a set of synthetic
vowel--glide--vowel sequences varying in F2 trajectories a range of frequencies
can equally well serve as mid segments in patterns identified as English /iwi/
and /uyu/. Many of these mid segments, when lengthed and presented in
isolation, resemble the high front rounded vowel [y], so that when short and
intervocalic one might expect them to be heard as the glide [(inverted aitch)],
at least by phonetically trained listeners. However, perceptual data suggest
that intended [(inverted aitch)] in /i/---/i/ is heard as /w/, while in
/u/---/u/ it is /y/. Assuming the syllabifications /i$wi/ and /u$yu/, one might
then expect an initial [(inverted aitch)] to be heard as /w/ in [(inverted
aitch)i] and as /y/ in [(inverted aitch)u]. Test data indicate otherwise.
Unlike /iwi/ and /uyu/, /wi/ and /yu/ show no overlap of F2 values in their
initial steady-state segments---there is instead a range of F2 values for which
listeners report both [underbar