ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

4pSP20. Exploration of the phonetic structure of cues for places of articulation.

Dept. of Psychol., SUNY at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY 13901

A multitask, multidimensional approach was used to evaluate the nature of perceptual space and relative importance of auditory cues for the perception of initial position voiced stop consonants of English. For /i/, /a/, and /u/ vowel contexts, stimuli varying systematically in F2- and F3- onset time and the nature of the initial release burst were examined from several different perspectives. For each vowel, a within-subject design was used, evaluating the stimuli in terms of speeded classification, goodness, and similarity, with the similarity scaling results submitted to a multidimensional analysis. Each of the tasks and stimulus parameters have been the focus of prior research, but have never been combined to provide a comprehensive, systematic description of perceptual space to provide converging evidence for the structure of phoneme categories and the interrelationships of cues for these categories.