INFLUENCES OF PHONETIC IDENTIFICATION AND CATEGORY GOODNESS ON AMERICAN LISTENERS PERCEPTION OF R AND L

Recent experiments have demonstrated that category goodness influences the perception of vowels [Iverson and Kuhl, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 5 53-562 (1995)]; listeners show a perceptual magnet effect characterize d by shrunken perceptual distances near excellent exemplars of vowel c ategories and stretched distances near poor exemplars. The present stu dy extends this investigation by examining the relative influence of p honetic identification and category goodness on the perception of Amer ican English /r/ and /l/. Eighteen /ra/ and /la/ tokens were synthesiz ed by varying F2 and F3 frequencies. Adult listeners identified and ra ted the goodness of individual stimuli, and rated the similarity of st imulus pairs. Multidimensional scaling analyses revealed that the perc eptual space was shrunk near the best exemplars of each category and s tretched near the category boundary. In addition, individual differenc es in /r/ identification corresponded to the degree of shrinking near the best exemplars of the /r/ category. The results demonstrate that c ategory goodness and phonetic identification both contribute to the pe rception of /r/ and /l/. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of America.