Possible Acoustic Bases for the Perception of Voicing Contrasts

Abstract

Fifteen years ago the main questions for speech research, at least from a psychoacoustic perspective, concerned exactly how speech perception is special. At that time there was no strong motivation to study the perception of acoustic analogs to speech cues. Beginning about twelve years ago a few papers demonstrated for simple stimuli some of the phonema which had been claimed to be unique to speech. In the late 1970s psychoacoustic research on speech perception tended primarily to challenge some of the strong claims about unique speech phenomena; this research also served to allow investigators to begin to learn about concepts, procedures, and potential acoustic cues. Recent psychoacoustic research has begun to map perceptual properties of simple possible analogs to components and cues in speech stimuli. This psychoacoustic research is guided by the extensive literature which has identified potential speech cues, and the perceptual interactions among such cues. The primary goal for this current psychoacoustic research is to gain an understanding of the nature of the perception of such stimuli. In achieving this goal, we will provide a better understanding of the front-end of the system which results in speech perception.

This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant 8302873 to the author and BRSG grant 07RR07149–12, Biomedical Research Support Grant Program, National Institutes of Health. The author acknowledges Jody Kaplan Layer, Robert J. Logan, Crystle Morris, Rosemary Szczesuil, and Virginia Wielgus for their significant contributions to the research described in this paper, and Charlotte MacLatchy for her critical reading of this paper.