Phonological context in speech perception

Speech perception can be viewed in terms of the listener’s integration of two sources of information: the acoustic features transduced by the auditory receptor system and the context of the linguistic message. The present research asked how these sources were evaluated and integrated in the identification of synthetic speech. A speech continuum between the glide-vowel syllables /ri/ and /li/ was generated by varying the onset frequency of the third formant. Each sound along the continuum was placed in a consonant-cluster vowel syllable after an initial consonant /p/, /t/, /s/, and /v/. In English, both /r/ and /l/ are phonologically admissible following /p/ but are not admissible following /v/. Only /l/ is admissible following /s/ and only /r/ is admissible following /t/. A third experiment used synthetic consonant-cluster vowel syllables in which the first consonant varied between /b/ and /d and the second consonant varied between /l/ and /r/. Identification of synthetic speech varying in both acoustic featural information and phonological context allowed quantitative tests of various models of how these two sources of information are evaluated and integrated in speech perception.