14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
Perception of coarticulated speech has been shown to be compensatory in that some of the acoustic characteristics of a target sound are attributed to coarticulatory context rather than to the target itself. But is perceptual compensation sensitive to language-specific coarticulatory patterns? This question was addressed through cross-language acoustic and perceptual study of two types of coarticulation that differ across languages, coarticulatory vowel nasalization (investigated in Thai and English) and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation (Shona and English). The perceptual differences across language groups were generally consistent with the patterns of coarticulation that emerged in the acoustic analyses. It is argued that language-specific coarticulatory structures give rise to listener expectations concerning the acoustic consequences of coarticulation and that such expectations lead, to a limited extent, to language-specific patterns of perceptual accommodation to coarticulated speech.
Bibliographic reference. Beddor, Patrice Speeter (1999): "Cross-language study of the perception of coarticulated speech", In ICPhS-14, 651-654.