EVALUATION OF VARIOUS SETS OF ACOUSTIC CUES FOR THE PERCEPTION OF PREVOCALIC STOP CONSONANTS .1. PERCEPTION EXPERIMENT

The purpose of the study presented in this paper and the accompanying paper [Smits er al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 3865-3881 (1996)] is to evaluate whether detailed or gross time-frequency structures are more relevant for the perception of place of articulation of prevocalic sto p consonants. To this end, first a perception experiment is carried ou t with ''burst-spliced'' stop-vowel utterances, containing the Dutch s tops /b,d,p,t/ and /k/. From the utterances burst-only, burstless, and cross-spliced stimuli were created and presented to listeners. The re sults of the experiment show that the relative importance of burst and transitions for the perception of place of articulation to a great ex tent depends on place and voicing of the stop consonant and on the vow el context. Velar bursts are generally more effective in cueing place of articulation than other bursts. There is no significant difference in the effectiveness of /p/, /t/, and /k/ transitions, while /b/ trans itions are more effective than /d/ transitions. The release burst domi nates the perception of place of articulation in front-vowel contexts, while the formant transitions are generally dominant in nonfront vowe l contexts. The bursts of unvoiced stops are perceptually more importa nt than the bursts of voiced stops. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of Ame rica.