Influences of contextual and local temporal information on perception of a stop consonant after [s]

Much of the perceptual information for a stop consonant in an [s]-stop cluster inheres in temporal properties of the acoustic signal local to the period of low energy corresponding to stop closure. However, stop percepts in this context are also influenced by the rate of speech in a precursor phrase to which the cluster is appended. The two experiments in this paper attempt to explore the dissociability of these local and longer-term perceptual influences, and to investigate the interactions between them. The results of the experiments reveal a complex pattern of interactions which suggests that a simple distinction between segmental and suprasegmental temporal information for phonetic contrasts is unrealistic.