15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Voicing and Temporal Order Perception by Spanish Speakers

Luis E. López-Bascuas (1), Burton S. Rosner (2), José E. García-Albea (3)

(1) Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
(2) University of Oxford, UK
(3) Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain

In previous studies in our laboratory using English speakers, voicing perception in plosive speech segments and temporal order perception in sinusoidal stimuli was examined. These studies revealed that although non-speech signals accommodated well to the standard assumption of Gaussian densities for the perceptual effects of the stimuli, speech signals densities turned out to be non-Gaussian. This effect seems to be attached to low level mechanisms of perceptual processing and, therefore, it should be replicable across different languages. So, in this study we had Spanish speakers rating stimuli from a Ba-Pa continuum and from a two-tone continuum. The speech continuum was created by varying the VOT (voice-onset-time) in 10 ms steps. The nonspeech continuum was constructed by varying the asynchrony between a high tone of 1500 Hz and a low tone of 500 Hz. The data were analysed according to a generalised signal detection model allowing for unequal criterion variances. Results replicated those obtained with English speakers. This result might call for specialized mechanisms in charge of speech perception.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  López-Bascuas, Luis E. / Rosner, Burton S. / García-Albea, José E. (2003): "Voicing and temporal order perception by Spanish speakers", In ICPhS-15, 403-406.