title: A psychoacoustic method for studying the necessary and sufficient perceptual cues of American English fricative consonants in noise.
abstract: In a previous study on plosives, the 3-Dimensional Deep Search (3DDS) method for the exploration of the necessary and sufficient cues for speech perception was introduced (Li et al., (2010). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 127(4), 2599-2610). Here, this method is used to isolate the spectral cue regions for perception of the American English fricatives /∫, 3, s, z, f, v, θ, δ in time, frequency, and intensity. The fricatives are analyzed in the context of consonant-vowel utterances, using the vowel /α/. The necessary cues were found to be contained in the frication noise for /∫, 3, s, z, f, v/. 3DDS analysis isolated the cue regions of /s, z/ between 3.6 and 8 [kHz] and /∫, 3/ between 1.4 and 4.2 [kHz]. Some utterances were found to contain acoustic components that were unnecessary for correct perception, but caused listeners to hear non-target consonants when the primary cue region was removed; such acoustic components are labeled "conflicting cue regions." The amplitude modulation of the high-frequency frication region by the fundamental F0 was found to be a sufficient cue for voicing. Overall, the 3DDS method allows one to analyze the effects of natural speech components without initial assumptions about where perceptual cues lie in time-frequency space or which elements of production they correspond to.
authors.affiliation: Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. fli12@jhmi.edu
authors.forename: Feipeng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Trevino
authors.forename: Anjali
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Menon
authors.forename: Jont B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Allen
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality