Abstract:

Previous EPG study of place coarticulation in Taiwanese stop consonants suggested that place gestures of two adjacent stops separated by a word boundary (CVC1#C2V(C)) overlapped each other to different degrees depending on speech rate. The place of articulation of C1 and C2 was either dental or velar. As speech rate increased, the perceptual categorization of C1 was affected. In faster speech rate, when the first word was heard in isolation, C1 tended to be perceived with the characteristics of C2 place gesture. However, there was no simple or consistent correlation between the patterns of gestural overlapping and the perception of C1. This lack of transparent relationship between articulatory gestures and perception motivates the current investigation on the acoustic dimension of place coarticulation. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the effect of place coarticulation on the spectral properties of CVC1. Discriminant analyses based on acoustic measures will be used to discriminate the dental stop from the velar stop. Estimated (posterior) probability of class membership of the stop consonants will be compared with the previous perception study to reveal how accurately the predicted probability of responses generated from discriminant analyses reflects the perceptual performance of listeners.