On the relevance of locus equations for production and perception of stop consonants. 1998

L Brancazio, and C A Fowler
Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. lab93006@uconnvm.uconn.edu

We examined the possible relevance of locus equations to human production and perception of stop consonants. The orderly output constraint (OOC) of Sussman, Fruchter, and Cable (1995) claims that humans have evolved to produce speech such that F2 at consonant release and F2 at vowel midpoint are linearly related for consonants so that developing perceptual systems can form representations in an F2ons-by-F2vowel space. The theory claims that this relationship described by locus equations can distinguish consonants, and that the linearity of locus equations is captured in neural representations and is thus perceptually relevant. We investigated these claims by testing how closely locus equations reflect the production and perception of stop consonants. In Experiment 1, we induced speakers to change their locus equation slope and intercept parameters systematically, but found that consonants remained distinctive in slope-by-intercept space. In Experiment 2, we presented stop-consonant syllables with their bursts removed to listeners, and compared their classification error matrices with the predictions of a model using locus equation prototypes and with those of an exemplar-based model that uses F2ons and F2vowel, but not locus equations. Both models failed to account for a large proportion of the variance in listeners' responses; the locus equation model was no better in its predictions than the exemplar model. These findings are discussed in the context of the OOC.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D008297 Male Males
D010700 Phonetics The science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed) Speech Sounds,Sound, Speech,Sounds, Speech,Speech Sound
D011571 Psychoacoustics The science pertaining to the interrelationship of psychologic phenomena and the individual's response to the physical properties of sound. Psychoacoustic
D005260 Female Females
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D000328 Adult A person having attained full growth or maturity. Adults are of 19 through 44 years of age. For a person between 19 and 24 years of age, YOUNG ADULT is available. Adults
D013018 Sound Spectrography The graphic registration of the frequency and intensity of sounds, such as speech, infant crying, and animal vocalizations. Sonography, Speech,Sonography, Sound,Speech Sonography,Sonographies, Sound,Sound Sonographies,Sound Sonography,Spectrography, Sound
D013067 Speech Perception The process whereby an utterance is decoded into a representation in terms of linguistic units (sequences of phonetic segments which combine to form lexical and grammatical morphemes). Speech Discrimination,Discrimination, Speech,Perception, Speech
D013068 Speech Production Measurement Measurement of parameters of the speech product such as vocal tone, loudness, pitch, voice quality, articulation, resonance, phonation, phonetic structure and prosody. Measurement, Speech Production,Measurements, Speech Production,Production Measurement, Speech,Production Measurements, Speech,Speech Production Measurements

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