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

5pSP5. Hard-of-hearing listeners' perception of consonants preceded or followed by stressed vowels.

Sally Revoile

Ctr. Auditory & Speech Sci., Gallaudet Univ., Washington, DC 20002

Harvey Dillon

Natl. Acoust. Labs., Sydney 2067, Australia

Knowledge is limited of the effects of syllable stress on consonant acoustic cues. Differences in consonant acoustic cues according to syllable stress may affect perceptibility by hard-of-hearing listeners. In this presentation, the perceptibility of consonants for hard-of-hearing listeners was examined depending on the stress patterns of the syllables in which the consonants resided. Each of 22 English consonants were spoken in /iCi/, /aCa/ and /(open oh)c(open oh)/ with stress on the initial vowel or the final vowel. The VCV's were extracted from a spoken sentence frame for the consonant identification tests. Seven listeners with moderate-to-severe hearing loss identified the consonant in each of the VCV's, which were presented at listeners' most comfortable levels. The listeners' perception was better for the consonants preceding the stressed vowels (56% mean) than when following the stressed vowels (38% mean). This disparity occurred across the vowels and consonant manner classes. However, the magnitude of the perceptual advantage for the consonants preceding stressed vowels differed noticeably among manner classes and vowel contexts. These perceptual differences were not explained by acoustic characteristics of consonant segment duration or intensity. [Work supported by NIDCD, NAL, and Gallaudet University.]