Abstract:

While formant transitions and burst cues have been implicated in the place perception of stop consonants, the exact nature of the integration of these cues remains unknown. This study investigates the interaction of these cues by having listeners identify synthetic consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli in which the second formant (F2) transition and the burst center frequency are simultaneously varied in both a front and back vowel context. The resulting identification surface will be presented for the individual subjects, and listeners' categorizations will be compared to categorization using discrimant analysis and a neural model. Preliminary evidence suggests that the burst center frequency is less critical to identification than which formant it is affiliated with, e.g., F2 or F3. Moreover, in certain contexts, the formant affiliation of the burst overrides the F2 transition information. This result seems to suggests that listeners are interpreting the burst as a formant that starts prior to the other formants, i.e., a ``leading'' formant. To study this further, the results from another experiment employing synthetic CV stimuli, where one formant leads the other formants, will be presented. [Work supported by NIH Grant DC00194.]