Perception of static and dynamic acoustic cues to place of articulation in initial stop consonants

Two recent accounts of the acoustic cues which specify place of articulation in syllable-initial stop consonants claim that they are located in the initial portions of the CV waveform and are context-free. Stevens and Blumstein [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64, 1358-1368 (1978)] have described the perceptually relevant spectral properties of these cues as static, while Kewley-Port [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 73, 322-335 (1983)] describes these cues as dynamic. Three perceptual experiments were conducted to test predictions derived from these accounts. Experiment 1 confirmed that acoustic cues for place of articulation are located in the initial 20-40 ms of natural stop-vowel syllables. Next, short synthetic CV's modeled after natural syllables were generated using either a digital, parallel-resonance synthesizer in experiment 2 or linear prediction synthesis in experiment 3. One set of synthetic stimuli preserved the static spectral properties proposed by Stevens and Blumstein. Another set of synthetic stimuli preserved the dynamic properties suggested by Kewley-Port. Listeners in both experiments identified place of articulation significantly better from stimuli which preserved dynamic acoustic properties than from those based on static onset spectra. Evidently, the dynamic structure of the initial stop-vowel articulatory gesture can be preserved in context-free acoustic cues which listeners use to identify place of articulation.