ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

1aSC16. Perceptual interaction of F1 and F0.

Jose R. Benki

Linguist. Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003

While F1 is a primary perceptual correlate of vowel height, other dimensions of vowels, such as F0, covary with F1 in natural speech. This study investigates the perceptual interaction of F0 and F1 in back vowels using the Garner paradigm. Two factors are hypothesized to determine the interaction: the magnitude of F1-F0 and the locations of the harmonics. F1 and F0 are predicted to integrate negatively for vowels in a threshold region (3.0 Bark >3.0 Bark) are predicted to show no interaction. Previous work [Benki et al., 2977(A) (1994)] suggests that F1 and F0 do not interact in the threshold region but integrate positively in the suprathreshold region. The predicted dependence on the locations of the harmonics follows from work by Hughes and Diehl [ 2978(A) (1994)] showing that F1 discriminability is enhanced when a harmonic is near nominal F1. To assess these effects, CVC stimuli ranging in F1 from 300--600 Hz and F0 from 90--120 Hz were presented to listeners in the Garner baseline and correlated classification tasks. A perceptual F0/F1 space is inferred using a detection-theory analysis of the accuracy data. [Work supported by NSF and NIH.]