Abstract:
A companion paper (``Acoustic effects of speaking with pellets on the articulators: An x-ray microbeam study'') will report on the effects of pellets on versus pellets off on spectral and temporal characteristics of a sentence-level utterance. In the present paper, the perceptual effects of speaking with pellets on the articulators will be reported. At least 20% of the task inventory recorded at the University of Wisconsin x-ray microbeam facility were collected without pellets. Multiple repetitions of a single utterance, recorded by 21 speakers with and without pellets attached to the articulators, were digitized and then output to tape in random order. Several different types of perceptual judgments were collected, including: (1) a dichotomous ``does the speaker have something in their mouth (or not)'' judgment; (2) scalings of perceptual dimensions such as ``articulatory precision;'' and (3) overall levels of utterance normalcy. Particular attention will be devoted to those speakers whose acoustic results (presented in a companion paper) showed a strong effect of the pellets. [Work supported by DC00820.]