EVALUATION OF VARIOUS SETS OF ACOUSTIC CUES FOR THE PERCEPTION OF PREVOCALIC STOP CONSONANTS .2. MODELING AND EVALUATION

The purpose of the study presented in this paper and the accompanying paper [Smits et al., J. Acoust. Sec. Am. 100, 3852-3864 (1996)] is to evaluate whether detailed or gross time-frequency structures are more relevant for the perception of prevocalic stop consonants. To this end , first a perception experiment was carried out with ''burst-spliced'' stop-vowel utterances. This experiment is described in the accompanyi ng paper. The present paper describes the second part of the investiga tion, i.e., the simulation of the behavior of the listeners in the per ception experiment. First, a number of detailed and gross cues are mea sured on the stimuli. Next, these cues are mapped onto the observed pe rceptual data using a formal model of human classification behavior. T he results show that in all cases the detailed cues, such as formant t ransitions, give a better account of the perceptual data than the gros s cues, such as the global spectral tilt and its initial change. The b est-performing models are interpreted in terms of the acoustic boundar ies which are associated with the perceived linguistic contrasts. Thes e boundaries are highly interpretable linear functions of five or six acoustic cues, which give a quantitative description of the often-disc ussed ''trade-off'' relation between the various cues for perception o f place of articulation in stop consonants. (C) 1996 Acoustical Societ y of America.