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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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Auditory scene analysis (ASA) is a theoretical framework that
aims to explain the auditory perceptual organization. We test the
hypothesis that formant continuity is used to link speech segments.
Three experiments are described that investigate listeners'
ability to use the formant continuity cues to categorise the synthetic
nasal /m/ and vowel-nasal syllables.
The first experiment shows that, without formant transitions, the
perception of a synthetic nasal /m/ changes from /m/ for vowels
with low second formant (F2) values to /n/ for vowels with high
F2s, this switch is consistent with the use of formant proximity
for perceptual organization.
The effect of introducing formant transitions as continuity cues
into the stimulus was investigated in a second experiment which
shows that transitions of only 5ms duration are sufficient to transform
the /en/ percept to a /em/.
The final experiment addresses the question of whether transitions
are analysed in fine detail by adding frequency modulated
tones into the stimulus. The addition of chirps changes the percept
if the chirp position is in the same position and direction as a
formant transition, although the fine spectral structure of the
sound is very different. If the chirp moves in the opposite direction,
it also changes the percept but to a lesser extent, which suggests
that only a coarse signal analysis is carried out.
Bibliographic reference. Meyer, Georg / Barry, William (1999): "Continuity based grouping affects the perception of vowel-nasal syllables", In ICPhS-14, 203-206.