ASA 125th Meeting Ottawa 1993 May

4pSP15. Individual variability in the use of acoustic cues to place and voicing contrasts.

Valerie L. Hazan

Shi Bo

Dept. of Phonet. and Linguistics, Univ. College London, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, UK

At the 123rd Meeting of the Society, initial results were reported of a study on individual variability in the perception of word and sentence material in synthetic and degraded natural speech conditions. The same group of 50 listeners, homogeneous in terms of a set of basic listener characteristics, were also tested on a series of identification tests. These included a /g/--/d/ place contrast and /g/--/k/ voicing contrast presented in three vocalic contexts (/i/, /ei/, /(ae ligature)/). Each contrast was presented in various full- and reduced-cue conditions, in order to evaluate the relative weighting given by listeners to different acoustic cues. For the place contrast, perceptual weighting given to the burst and formant transition cues varied widely according to individual listeners and vocalic context. However, for the voicing contrast, much more homogeneous results were obtained. No strong relation was found between listeners' performance on reduced-cue identification tests for place and voicing contrasts and intelligibility scores for VCV utterances and sentence material. [Work supported by SERC.]