Perception of coarticulated lip rounding

Area of Science:

• Phonetics
• Speech Perception
• Acoustic Phonetics

Background:

• Coarticulation, the influence of adjacent speech sounds, affects consonant-vowel interactions.
• Lip rounding in vowels significantly impacts preceding consonant articulation.
• Understanding perceivability of coarticulatory cues is crucial for speech perception models.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the perceivability of coarticulated lip rounding in French consonant clusters.
• To determine the extent of acoustic information available for vowel identification from truncated consonant clusters.
• To assess the role of coarticulatory features in speech sound identification.

Main Methods:

• Nine French utterances with specific consonant clusters (/kstr/, /rstr/, /rskr/) and vowels (/i/, /y/, /u/) were created.
• Utterances were truncated at four points, varying the amount of preceding consonant information.
• Participants (French and English speakers, with/without phonetic training) predicted the missing vowel.

Main Results:

• Vowel identification accuracy was significantly above chance when at least half of the final consonant was present.
• Some participants identified vowels even with shorter acoustic segments.
• No significant performance differences were observed between language groups or phonetic training levels.

Conclusions:

• Coarticulation, particularly lip rounding and horizontal place of articulation, provides significant, perceivable acoustic information.
• This coarticulatory information aids the perceptual mechanism in speech sound identification.
• The findings support the role of anticipatory coarticulation in robust speech perception.