Context effects in recognizing syllable-final /z/ and /s/ in different phrasal positions.
An examination of the effect of phrase-final lengthening on the temporal correlates of voicing in syllable-final /s/ and /z/ was conducted. Discriminant analyses revealed that a combination of vowel duration, frication duration, and the duration of simultaneous voicing and frication was quite successful in determining voicing independently of phrase-final lengthening. Two perceptual experiments revealed that human listeners' recognition of the segments does benefit from hearing the syllables in sentential context as opposed to when they are excised from context and presented in isolation. The benefit was greatest for /s/ in phrase-final position and /z/ in phrase-internal position. This suggests that the presence of sentential context allows listeners to factor out the influence of phrase-final lengthening on vowel duration and to more accurately interpret this cue to voicing of the final fricative. These findings extend previous results on rate-dependent processing of overall speaking rate to the processing of local speaking rate. By doing so, they provide further evidence of the importance of extended phonetic context in speech recognition.
Gordon
P C
PC
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.
D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*