Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context

作者：John J. Ohala, Deborah Feder · 发表于：Phonetica · 年份：1994 · DOI：10.1159/000261963 · 被引用次数：29 · 研究领域：Phonetics and Phonology Research、Linguistic Variation and Morphology、Speech Recognition and Synthesis

Abstract When listeners’ identifications of speech sounds are influenced by adjacent sounds, is it only the quantitative phonetic characteristics of these neighboring sounds that matter, or could their qualitative linguistic identity play a role? We tested this by inducing subjects to ‘restore’ a noise-obliterated medial consonant in VCe utterances by first presenting them with several prior utterances where this medial consonant could be heard clearly and was consistently the same, either a /b/ or a /d/. Included as V were synthetic steady-state vowels from the /i-u/ continuum. More /u/’s were identified out of this continuum in the environment of physically present /d/’s than /b/’s. Restored /d/’s had the same effect, thus indicating that the influence of context need not operate only via physical phonetic features. These results suggest that strict phonetic invariance of phonological units may not be necessary.