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

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Pattern Playback Revisited: Unvoiced Stop Consonant Perception

Michael Kiefte (1), Keith R. Kluender (2)

(1) Dalhousie University, Canada
(2) University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

This paper describes a series of experiments designed to replicate results on prevocalic voiceless stop consonant identification initially obtained by Liberman et al. using the Pattern Playback (Liberman et al., 1952). Initial attempts to simulate the Pattern Playback were unable to produce the characteristic pattern of responses originally obtained. However, response probabilities more similar to those observed by Liberman et al. were obtained using stimuli in which third-harmonic distortion characteristic of diode tube amplifiers was added to the stimuli. Comparison with spectrograms obtained from true Pattern Playback speech show a close resemblance to these distorted stimuli.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kiefte, Michael / Kluender, Keith R. (2003): "Pattern playback revisited: unvoiced stop consonant perception", In ICPhS-15, 1417-1420.