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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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It is well known now that speech chain is not constituted by discrete units. Speech sounds have an influence on other sounds directly in contact with them. We hypothesize that this influence is not noise but plays an important role for perception. To test this hypothesis, a particular case of allophonic variation (liquid devoicing in unvoiced context) is tested. We predict that this variation could be used by listeners as far as it is robust cue. Two perceptual experiments (forced choice and phoneme monitoring) are managed to evaluate the role of allophonic variation for speech perception when expected phonetic information is missing. The results confirm our hypotheses that allophonic variations (devoiced liquids) are used as predominant cues by subjects to identify contextual phonemes.
Bibliographic reference. Meunier, Christine (1999): "Recovering missing phonetic information from allophonic variation", In ICPhS-14, 845-848.