On the perception of voicing in syllable-initial plosives in noise

Previous studies [Lisker, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 57, 1547-1551 (1975); Summerfield and Haggard, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 62, 435-448 (1977)] have shown that voice onset time (VOT) and the onset frequency of the first formant are important perceptual cues of voicing in syllable-initial plosives. Most prior work, however, has focused on speech perception in quiet environments. The present study seeks to determine which cues are important for the perception of voicing in syllable-initial plosives in the presence of noise. Perceptual experiments were conducted using stimuli consisting of naturally spoken consonant-vowel syllables by four talkers in various levels of additive white Gaussian noise. Plosives sharing the same place of articulation and vowel context (e.g., /pa,ba/) were presented to subjects in two alternate forced choice identification tasks, and a threshold signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) value (corresponding to the 79% correct classification score) was estimated for each voiced/voiceless pair. The threshold SNR values were then correlated with several acoustic measurements of the speech tokens. Results indicate that the onset frequency of the first formant is critical in perceiving voicing in syllable-initial plosives in additive white Gaussian noise, while the VOT duration is not.