Perception of pre-vocalic and post-vocalic consonants produced by tracheoesophageal speakers

The purpose of this project was to investigate the perception of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) stimuli produced by four tracheoesophageal (TE) speakers. Stimuli were representative of five phonetic manner classes (stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, and liquidglide). Twelve naive normal-hearing young adults served as listeners. Stimuli were presented via headphones and listeners were prepared and analyses of the data were conducted for individual speakers and for the entire group. The listeners' perceptual judgments were analyzed for each manner of production by phonetic context. Based on statistical analyses of the data obtained, all four speakers were perceived by listeners to produce post-vocalic consonants with significantly better intelligibility.