C. A. Wannemacher
Dept. of Psychol., State Univ. of New York at Buffalo, Park Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
A growing body of research has begun to explore the relationship between the processing of phonetic information and that of talker voice information. To this end, the present work employed a series of experiments designed to further investigate potential phoneme and voice integrality in the acoustic-phonetic coding process. In a preliminary experiment, listeners rated the similarity of pairs of tokens from several female talkers. Stimuli chosen from this corpus were used in subsequent selective attention experiments to assess interference in phonetic processing under conditions of high and low vocal similarity. Phonetic classifications were made for isolated vowels, nonword CVs, and word CVs. As a further constraint of voice variability, multiple tokens from a single talker were also used in a selective attention task. The results will be discussed with respect to the nature and degree of voice-phonme integrality as a function of vocal variability, as well as to issues of talker normalization in speech perception. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC-000219 to SUNY at Buffalo.]