14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Predicting Dependencies in Phonetic Categorization from Distributions of Acoustical Cues in Natural Utterances

Roel Smits

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

This study addressed several basic issues in the perception of coarticulated phonemes. First, the potential consequences of coarticulation on the distributions of acoustical cues were discussed. It was argued that a pattern classifier would deal with the problem by introducing dependencies between the recognition of successive phonemes. Next, the theoretical argument was applied to the perception and production of Dutch syllables /si sy ʃi ʃy/. Based on acoustical cue distributions measured on natural utterances of these syllables, listeners' perceptual strategies were predicted. Predictions were compared with listeners' categorizations of a synthetic two-dimensional fricative-vowel continuum. Despite some quantitative discrepancies, good correspondence between predicted and observed categorization dependencies were found.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Smits, Roel (1999): "Predicting dependencies in phonetic categorization from distributions of acoustical cues in natural utterances", In ICPhS-14, 207-210.