title: Acceptability for temporal modification of consecutive segments in isolated words.
abstract: Perceptual sensitivity to temporal modification in two consecutive speech segments was measured in word contexts to explore the following two questions: (1) whether there is an interaction between multiple segmental durations, and (2) what aspect of the stimulus context determines the perceptually salient temporal markers? Experiment 1 obtained acceptability ratings for words with temporal modifications. The results showed that the compensatory change in duration of a vowel (V) and its adjacent consonant (C) is not perceptually so salient as expected for the simultaneous modifications in the two segments. This finding suggests the presence of a time perception range wider than a single segment (V or C). The results of experiment 1 also showed that rating scores for compensatory modification between V and C do not depend on the temporal order of modified pairs (VC or CV), but rather on the loudness difference between V and C; the acceptability decreased when the loudness difference between V and C became high. This suggests that perceptually salient markers locate around major jumps in loudness. The second finding, the dependence on the loudness jump, was replicated in experiment 2, which utilized a detection task for temporal modifications on nonspeech stimuli modeling the time-loudness features of the speech stimuli. Experiment 3 further investigated the influence of the temporal order of V and C by utilizing the detection task for the speech stimuli instead of the acceptability ratings.
authors.affiliation: ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. kato@hip.atr.co.jp
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tsuzaki
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sagisaka
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008144:Loudness Perception; D010700:Phonetics; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors