Temporal and spectral cue use for initial plosive voicing perception by hearing-impaired children and normal-hearing children and adults.
The influence of voice-onset time (VOT) and vowel-onset characteristics on the perception of the voicing contrast for initial plosive consonants was examined for hearing-impaired children, and normal-hearing children and adults. Listeners identified spoken 'DAD'--'TAD' stimuli controlled for VOT and vowel onset characteristics. Only six of 16 hearing-impaired children appropriately identified the exemplar DAD and TAD stimuli used as endpoints of VOT continua. For this group of six hearing-impaired children, a longer VOT than for the normal-hearing listeners was required to elicit /t/ rather than /d/ percepts. The VOT region of perceptual cross-over in labelling widened progressively from normal-hearing adults to normal-hearing children to hearing-impaired children. Generally, longer VOTs were required to yield /t/ perception in the context of the DAD vowel than with the TAD vowel. These 'vowel stem' effects on VOT boundary were inconsistent for the hearing-impaired children, and weaker for the normal-hearing children than for the adults. These spoken stimuli produced results for VOT cue use that generally parallel those obtained in studies with synthetic stimuli.
Holden-Pitt
L D
LD
Center for Auditory and Speech Sciences, Gallaudet University, USA.
Hazan
V
V
Revoile
S G
SG
Edward
D M
DM
Droge
J
J
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D006309:Hearing; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors