The distinctness of speakers' productions of vowel contrasts is related to their discrimination of the contrasts.
This study addresses the hypothesis that the more accurately a speaker discriminates a vowel contrast, the more distinctly the speaker produces that contrast. Measures of speech production and perception were collected from 19 young adult speakers of American English. In the production experiment, speakers repeated the words cod, cud, who'd, and hood in a carrier phrase at normal, clear, and fast rates. Articulatory movements and the associated acoustic signal were recorded, yielding measures of contrast distance between /a/ and /[see text for symbol]/ and between /u/ and /[see text for symbol]/. In the discrimination experiment, sets of seven natural-sounding stimuli ranging from cod to cud and who'd to hood were synthesized, based on productions by one male and one female speaker. The continua were then presented to each of the 19 speakers in labeling and discrimination tasks. Consistent with the hypothesis, speakers with discrimination scores above the median produced greater acoustic contrasts than speakers with discrimination scores at or below the median. Such a relation between speech production and perception is compatible with a model of speech production in which articulatory movements for vowels are planned primarily in auditory space.
Perkell
Joseph S
JS
Speech Communication Group, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. perkell@speech.mit.edu
Guenther
Frank H
FH
Lane
Harlan
H
Matthies
Melanie L
ML
Stockmann
Ellen
E
Tiede
Mark
M
Zandipour
Majid
M
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010699:Phonation; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014159:Transducers