THE PROCESSING OF DURATION AND INTENSITY CUES TO PROMINENCE

This paper presents results from two experiments designed to show how duration are processed during speech perception, Duration and intensit y are two physical dimensions which are known to interact psychoacoust ically in the perception of both length (a term that will be used for perceived duration) and loudness. The first experiment, a selective at tention task, shows that length and loudness ate processed as a unit [ integrally, in the terms of Garner, The Processing of Information and Structure (Erlbaum, Potomac, MD, 1974)], but that the integrality is a symmetric: Extracting length information appears to be easier than ext racting loudness information. The results of the first experiment make the prediction that listeners would not use loudness by itself in mak ing prominence judgments, since the extraction of loudness in the pres ence of duration variation appears to require a (relatively) high proc essing load. The second experiment, a traditional trading relation exp eriment in which duration and intensity were varied orthogonally, appe ars to bear out this prediction, Listeners' responses were predicted f rom computed measures of length and loudness in: a linear multiple reg ression analysis, Results show a negligible independent contribution o f loudness to listeners' responses. Listeners' behavior is best predic ted by computed measures of length. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of Ame rica.