title: Tracking perception of the sounds of English.
abstract: Twenty American English listeners identified gated fragments of all 2288 possible English within-word and cross-word diphones, providing a total of 538,560 phoneme categorizations. The results show orderly uptake of acoustic information in the signal and provide a view of where information about segments occurs in time. Information locus depends on each speech sound's identity and phonological features. Affricates and diphthongs have highly localized information so that listeners' perceptual accuracy rises during a confined time range. Stops and sonorants have more distributed and gradually appearing information. The identity and phonological features (e.g., vowel vs consonant) of the neighboring segment also influences when acoustic information about a segment is available. Stressed vowels are perceived significantly more accurately than unstressed vowels, but this effect is greater for lax vowels than for tense vowels or diphthongs. The dataset charts the availability of perceptual cues to segment identity across time for the full phoneme repertoire of English in all attested phonetic contexts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona, Box 210028, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0028.
authors.forename: Natasha
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Warner
authors.affiliation: Radboud University Nijmegen, Postbus 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: McQueen
authors.affiliation: The MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, New South Wales 2751, Australia.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cutler
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors