Is it VOT or a first-formant transition detector?

Abstract

Discussion of voicing as a distinctive property of English stop consonants in initial position has centered on the measure of ’’VOT,’’ the time of onset of laryngeal signal relative to the noise pulse generated by the stop release, but it has been shown that listeners’ selection of ‖b,d,g‖ vs ‖p,t,k‖ responses to synthetic stop+vowel stimuli is not determined entirely by VOT. Significant effects have been reported to depend on the behavior of the first formant (F1) frequency immediately following voice onset, and on this basis it has been suggested that a ’’feature detector’’ responsive to a rapidly shifting F1 better explains the infant’s discrimination of the two stop categories than some mechanism which measures VOT directly. The relative importance of VOT as against the presence versus absence of F1 frequency shift after voice onset is assayed in several synthesis experiments in which VOT and F1 configurations are systematically varied. Labeling data obtained indicate that varying VOT regularly effects a significant change in listeners’ judgments, and that varying F1 has some effect too, but this latter variation is neither necessary nor sufficient generally to shift judgments decisively from one stop category to the other. The data further suggest that the presence of an F1 rising transition after voice onset serves as a voiced-stop cue not so much because of its dynamic aspect, but simply because its onset frequency is low, i.e., at a value appropriate to a closed or almost closed state of the oral cavity. Subject Classification: 70.30, 70.20, 70.70.

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