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.]