Abstract:
The importance of dynamic formant information for vowel identification has been shown by several studies in recent years. Using sine-wave vowel analogs, Neel and Kewley-Port [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 3284(A) (1994)] demonstrated that vowel duration is an important cue for vowel identity and that dynamic formant information is more effective when duration cues are absent. However, because identification rates for sine-wave stimuli were low, a training study was conducted to determine the impact of training on the effectiveness of dynamic formant and duration cues for vowel identification. Sine-wave stimuli consisted of two tones representing F1 and F2 from 10 vowels produced by a female speaker. Four types of stimuli were constructed by varying two factors: (1) dynamic versus static formants and (2) appropriate versus fixed vowel duration. Listeners were trained to criterion on one set of stimuli and were tested on another. Training significantly improved identification accuracy. In comparison to performance on static formant tokens, listeners were more accurate in identification and improved more from baseline to test when dynamic formant cues were present. Listeners also showed an identification advantage when duration cues were available. [Research supported by NIHDCD Research Grant No. DC-02229.]