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Pattern playback revisited: unvoiced stop consonant perception.

Michael Kiefte¹, Keith R Kluender

¹School of Human Communication Disorders, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 1R2, Canada. mkiefte@dal.ca

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|November 4, 2005

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Harmonic distortion in early speech synthesizers explains why some sounds were perceived differently. Replicating Liberman et al.

Area of Science:

Speech Perception
Acoustic Phonetics
Psychoacoustics

Background:

Liberman et al. (1952) reported complex acoustic-perceptual mappings for synthetic speech sounds.
Their findings on bimodal /k/ identification remain influential but challenging for simple models.

Purpose of the Study:

To replicate Liberman et al.'s experiment using a simulated Pattern Playback device.
To investigate the acoustic basis of previously observed speech perception patterns.

Main Methods:

Generated synthetic speech stimuli using a Pattern Playback simulation.
Analyzed spectrographic data to identify acoustic features influencing perception.
Introduced harmonic distortion to stimuli to test its perceptual effects.

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Main Results:

Harmonic distortion, characteristic of early tube amplifiers, was identified in spectrographic data.
Bimodal /k/ identification in front-vowel contexts emerged only when harmonic distortion was present.
Distortion added spectral peaks, influencing the perceived relationship between acoustic bursts and formants.

Conclusions:

The complex mapping between acoustics and perception is simplified when harmonic distortion is absent.
Perception of stop bursts is context-dependent, as noted by Liberman et al.
Harmonic distortion provides a crucial acoustic explanation for specific perceptual findings in early speech synthesis research.