Some effects of duration on vowel recognition

James M. Hillenbrand · Michael J Clark · Robert A. Houde

230 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Voice and Speech Disorders Neuroscience and Music Perception

Abstract

This study was designed to examine the role of duration in vowel perception by testing listeners on the identification of CVC syllables generated at different durations. Test signals consisted of synthesized versions of 300 utterances selected from a large, multitalker database of /hVd/ syllables [Hillenbrand et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 3099-3111 (1995)]. Four versions of each utterance were synthesized: (1) an original duration set (vowel duration matched to the original utterance), (2) a neutral duration set (duration fixed at 272 ms, the grand mean across all vowels), (3) a short duration set (duration fixed at 144 ms, two standard deviations below the mean), and (4) a long duration set (duration fixed at 400 ms, two standard deviations above the mean). Experiment 1 used a formant synthesizer, while a second experiment was an exact replication using a sinusoidal synthesis method that represented the original vowel spectrum more precisely than the formant synthesizer. Findings included (1) duration had a small overall effect on vowel identity since the great majority of signals were identified correctly at their original durations and at all three altered durations; (2) despite the relatively small average effect of duration, some vowels, especially [see text] and [see text], were significantly affected by duration; (3) some vowel contrasts that differ systematically in duration, such as [see text], and [see text], were minimally affected by duration; (4) a simple pattern recognition model appears to be capable of accounting for several features of the listening test results, especially the greater influence of duration on some vowels than others; and (5) because a formant synthesizer does an imperfect job of representing the fine details of the original vowel spectrum, results using the formant-synthesized signals led to a slight overestimate of the role of duration in vowel recognition, especially for the shortened vowels.

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References

1952Control Methods Used in a Study of the Vowels 1995Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels 1990Analysis, synthesis, and perception of voice quality variations among female and male talkers 1976Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence 1960Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English 1953The Influence of Consonant Environment upon the Secondary Acoustical Characteristics of Vowels 1972Preceding Vowel Duration as a Cue to the Perception of the Voicing Characteristic of Word-Final Consonants in American English 1986Modeling the role of inherent spectral change in vowel identification

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2004Computer-based training for learning English vowel contrasts 2010Natural Referent Vowel (NRV) framework: An emerging view of early phonetic development 2015Individual differences in phonetic cue use in production and perception of a non-native sound contrast 2008Vowel Space Characteristics and Vowel Identification Accuracy 2007Learning English vowels with different first-language vowel systems: Perception of formant targets, formant movement, and duration

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