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

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


The Role of Vocalic Context in the Perception of Polish Sibilants

Pawel M. Nowak

University of California at Berkeley, USA

This paper is a report on a perceptual experiment testing the possible role that cues residing in the vocalic environment may play in the recognition and categorization of Polish sibilant consonants. Five subjects participated in a listening task in which they were exposed to both normal VCV stimuli, as well as ones in which the medial consonants had been cross-spliced. The results show that cues present in the vocalic context may override those coming from the fricative noise. It is suggested that these results may be helpful in explaining an unexpected pattern of mergers found in Polish dialects, with a possible counterpart in varieties of Mandarin.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Nowak, Pawel M. (2003): "The role of vocalic context in the perception of Polish sibilants", In ICPhS-15, 2309-2312.