ASA 125th Meeting Ottawa 1993 May

2pSP13. Phonetic classification of plosive voicing using computational modeling.

Dept. of Phonet. & Linguist., University College London, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, England

One approach to investigating the roles of auditory and phonetic processing in speech perception tasks is to compare the performance of listeners with no phonetic processing capabilities (animals and machines) to those of human listeners. Here, a computational model of the peripheral auditory system was coupled to an artificial neural net pattern classifier in order to investigate the essential auditory and phonetic features that distinguish voiced and unvoiced plosives in initial position. The computational model and the human listeners were presented with three stimulus series, varying in voice onset time, representing English bilabials (``ba''--``pa''), alveolars (``da''--``ta''), and velars (``ga''--``ka''). The categorization functions obtained for the model and for human listeners will be compared with regard to their sharpness, and shift of phoneme boundary with place of articulation. [Work supported by the Joint Council Initiative in Cognitive Science/HCI (UK).]