Perception of intervocalic stop consonants: the contributions of closure duration and formant transitions

Acoustic analyses of vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) utterances indicate that they generally include formant transitions from the first vowel into a period of closure (VC transitions), and transitions out of the closure into the second vowel (CV transitions). Three experiments investigated the perceptual importance of the VC transitions, the CV transitions, and the closure period in identification of medial stop consonants varying in place of articulation. Experiment 1 compared identification of members of synthetic VC and CV continua with those from VCV series made by concatenating corresponding VC and CV stimuli using various closure durations. Experiment 2 examined identification of VCV stimuli constructed with only VC, only CV, or both VC and CV transitions; again closure duration was systematically varied. Experiment 3 correlated CV and VC identification with identification of VCV stimuli. Neither closure duration nor formant transition structure (i.e., only VC, only CV, or both) had an independent effect on identification. Instead, the formant structure and closure duration together strongly affected stop identification. When both VC and CV transitions were present, the CV transitions contributed somewhat more to identification of medial stops with short closures, than the VC transitions did. With longer closure durations, neither set of transitions appeared to determine perceived place of articulation in any simple way. Overall, the data indicate that the perception of a medial consonant is more than simply a (weighted) sum of its parts.