Subjective evaluation of articulatory effort

Thirty-two adult speakers repeated pairs of CV syllables, each embedded in a carrier phrase, and designated the consonant member of the pair they believed required more articulatory effort. The task was performed under three speaking conditions (1) normal conversational speech, (2) whispered speech, and (3) pantomimed speech. Voicing and fricative manner of production appeared to be related to judgments of greater articulatory effort. Highly consistent responses across the three speaking conditions suggest other psychological factors to which subjects respond during conditions of normal as well as subvocal modes of speaking. Analyses yielded significant correlations between articulatory effort responses and current data concerning children's phonological acquisition, children's phoneme substitution patterns, and frequency of occurrence of consonants in conversational English.