The Phonological Representation of [VOICE] in Speech Perception

Allard Jongman · Joan A. Sereno · Marianne Raaijmakers

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Reading and Literacy Development Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

This paper examines to what extent phonological representations affect word identification. The contrast under investigation involves the interaction between voicing and vowel length in Dutch. Dutch has underlying contrasts both in obstruent voicing and in vowel length. The voicing contrast is neutralized on the surface in syllable-final position. Also, both long and short vowels are lengthened by some 25 msec when followed by medial voiced obstruents. The present study investigated whether this vowel length cue influenced listeners when hearing stimuli with ambiguous vowel duration in an identical, neutralized consonantal context in which the underlying representation of the obstruent following the vowel differed in voicing. A vowel length continuum ([at] to [a:t]) was created and appended to initial consonants to make two pairs of real words. Each pair differed in vowel length with opposite underlying final consonant representations: /zat/-/za:d/, and /stad/-/sta:t/. Our question was whether the vowel category boundaries would be different in pairs like /zat/-/za:d/ as compared to /stad/-/sta:t/. Although the underlying consonant is either voiced or voiceless, the surface word-final consonant for both pairs of stimuli is always voiceless ([t]). If the listener uses a surface representation with a voiceless consonant to recognize the words, there should be no difference in categorization of the vowel-length continua. The results of a vowel categorization task, however, showed a significant difference in the location of the phoneme boundaries between the two continua, suggesting that listeners' perception seems to be guided by the underlying phonological representation of words.

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References

1960Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English 1980Phonetic categorization in auditory word perception.1953The Influence of Consonant Environment upon the Secondary Acoustical Characteristics of Vowels 1970Vowel Length Variation as a Function of the Voicing of the Consonant Environment 1984Categorical Perception: Issues, Methods, Findings 1991The mental representation of lexical form: A phonological approach to the recognition lexicon 1972Preceding Vowel Duration as a Cue to the Perception of the Voicing Characteristic of Word-Final Consonants in American English 1962The Identification and Discrimination of Synthetic Vowels

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2003A Parametric Approach to the Phonetics of Postvocalic /r/ in Dutch 2007Acquisition of morpho-phonology : the Dutch voicing alternation

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