La invariación acústica en las oclusivas sordas del castellano. Estudio perceptivo

Abstract

In this paper we tried to find out whether breve consonant-vowel stimuli give sufficient acoustic cues for place of articulation in Spanish unvoiced stops. With this aim, we synthesized a series of short-duration syllables (10, 20, 29 and 46 ms), which were subsequently manipulated removing vowel transitions in experiments 1 and 4 and transitions as well as the initial burst in experiment 2. This allowed us to test the importance of this parameters on speech perception. The resulting stimuli were randomized and presented to subjects for identification. The results we obtained, although not as encouraging as those obtained by Blurnstein and Stevens (1980), provided us with the evidence we needed to support the validity of the initial hypothesis, i.e., that brief stimuli were reliable for the listeners to identify [p], [t] and [k] and that they also contained sufficient information for vowel identification.