Effects of voicing in the recognition of concurrent syllables.
This letter reports a study designed to measure the benefits of voicing in the recognition of concurrent syllables. The target and distracter syllables were either voiced or whispered, producing four combinations of vocal contrast. Results show that listeners use voicing whenever it is present either to detect a target syllable or to reject a distracter. When the predictable effects of audibility were taken into account, limited evidence remained for the harmonic cancellation mechanism thought to make rejecting distracter syllables more effective than enhancing target syllables.
Vestergaard
Martin D
MD
Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EG, United Kingdom.
Patterson
Roy D
RD
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult