Benoit Jacques
Dept. de linguistique, Univ. du Quebec a Montreal, Case postale 8888, succ. A, Montreal H3C 3P8, Canada
Guillermo Toledo
UQAM and LIS, Conicet, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The aim of this paper was to determine the trade-off relationship among acoustic cues, i.e., the transitions of the preceding vowel, the burst, the transitions of the following vowel, or the relevance of an acoustic cue on the perception of Canadian French unvoiced stops. To that end utterances of two segments containing VCV sequences of two different unvoiced stops and the same type of vowel were produced by a native speaker of Canadian French. Stimuli integrated by two acoustic cues of a place of articulation and a conflicting cue of another place of articulation were made up through the splicing and editing of these VCV sequences. In addition, stimuli obtained by the splicing of the second syllable in each segment were carried out in order to test the role of the transitions of the preceding vowel. Listening tests through a panel comprising of 14 French Canadian subjects were performed. Results showed that the trade-off relation of acoustic cues was the main information for the recognition of Canadian French unvoiced stops, although in a few vowel contexts, listeners might be able to identify through one acoustic cue. [Work supported by an ICCS grant to the second author.]