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

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


Cross-Language Study of the Perception of Coarticulated Speech

Patrice Speeter Beddor

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 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.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Beddor, Patrice Speeter (1999): "Cross-language study of the perception of coarticulated speech", In ICPhS-14, 651-654.