PERCEPTUAL NORMALIZATION FOR SPEAKING RATE - EFFECTS OF TEMPORAL DISTANCE

A series of studies was undertaken to examine how rate normalization i n speech perception would be influenced by the similarity, duration, a nd phonotactics of phonemes that were adjacent or distal from the init ial, target phoneme. The duration of the adjacent (following) phoneme always had an effect on perception of the initial target. Neither phon otactics nor acoustic similarity seemed to have any influence on this rate normalization effect. However, effects of the duration of the non adjacent (distal) phoneme were only found when that phoneme was tempor ally close to the target. These results suggest that there is a tempor al window over which rate normalization occurs. In most cases, only th e adjacent phoneme or adjacent two phonemes will fall within this wind ow and thus influence perception of a phoneme distinction.