Evaluation of various sets of acoustic cues for the perception of prevocalic stop consonants. I. Perception experiment.

The purpose of the study presented in this paper and the accompanying paper [Smits et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 3865-3881 (1996)] is to evaluate whether detailed or gross time-frequency structures are more relevant for the perception of place of articulation of prevocalic stop consonants. To this end, first a perception experiment is carried out with "burst-spliced" stop-vowel utterances, containing the Dutch stops /b,d,p,t/ and /k/. From the utterances burst-only, burstless, and cross-spliced stimuli were created and presented to listeners. The results of the experiment show that the relative importance of burst and transitions for the perception of place of articulation to a great extent depends on place and voicing of the stop consonant and on the vowel context. Velar bursts are generally more effective in cueing place of articulation than other bursts. There is no significant difference in the effectiveness of /p/, /t/, and /k/ transitions, while /b/ transitions are more effective than /d/ transitions. The release burst dominates the perception of place of articulation in front-vowel contexts, while the formant transitions are generally dominant in nonfront vowel contexts. The bursts of unvoiced stops are perceptually more important than the bursts of voiced stops.