Stuart Rosen
Angela M. Darling
Andrew Faulkner
Mark Huckvale
Dept. of Phonet. & Linguistics, Univ. College London, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, England
The distinction between intervocalic voiceless affricates and fricatives is a useful one for studies of cue interaction in speech for two main reasons. First, there are at least three temporal cues that are known to interact in this contrast (the duration of the silence preceding the frication, the rise time of the frication, and the duration of the frication). Second, there have been a number of claims that auditory processes may play a crucial role both in the perception of some of the individual cues (in particular, rise time), and in accounting for the interaction of some cues (in particular, silence duration and rise time). New empirical data is presented from a multifactorial identification experiment (involving the simultaneous variation of silence duration, frication rise time and frication duration) and the extent to which various theories of affricate/fricative perception can account for the observed results is examined. [Work supported by the Joint Council Initiative in Cognitive Science/HCI (UK).]