14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

The Syllable as a Perceptive Criterion to Distinguish between Vowels and ‘Glides’

Doris Mücke (1), Frank C. Stoffel (1), Bernd J. Kröger (2)

(1) Institute of Phonetics, University of Cologne, Germany
(2) Research Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany

This study deals with the syllable as a reliable unit to distinguish between ‘glides’ and vowels. Starting from a gestural framework implemented in an articulatory speech synthesizer we generated stimuli varying from syllabic to non-syllabic /i/- sounds in prevocalic positions of German. Avoiding qualitative effects we reduced the corresponding vocalic gestures in their magnitude by manipulating the gestural eigenperiod which controls the velocity of the gesture-executing articulator towards its spatial target. The transition of syllabic (vowel) to non-syllabic (‘glide’) function were tested by two groups of listeners: 150 native speakers of German and 69 speakers of German as a second language.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Mücke, Doris / Stoffel, Frank C. / Kröger, Bernd J. (1999): "The syllable as a perceptive criterion to distinguish between vowels and ‘glides’", In ICPhS-14, 2473-2476.