Perceptual parsing of acoustic consequences of velum lowering from information for vowels

Three experiments were designed to investigate how listeners to coarticulat ed speech use the acoustic speech signal during a vowel to extract informat ion about a forthcoming oral or nasal consonant. A first experiment showed that listeners use evidence of nasalization in a vowel as information for a forthcoming nasal consonant. A second and third experiment attempted to di stinguish two accounts of their ability to do so. According to one account, listeners hear nasalization in the vowel as such and use it to predict tha t a forthcoming nasal consonant is nasal. According to a second, they perce ive speech gestures and hear nasalization in the acoustic domain of a vowel as the onset of a nasal consonant, Therefore, they parse nasal information from a vowel and hear the vowel as oral, in Experiment 2, evidence in favo r of the parsing hypothesis was found. Experiment 3 showed, however, that p arsing is incomplete.