PROCESSING OF ACOUSTIC CUES FOR VOICING IN ENGLISH: A MMN STUDY

Outi Tuomainen & Heather van der Lely
Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, London

ID 1600
[full paper]

In speech perception, multiple acoustic cues are used to signal a specific speech sound contrast. In the present experiment the processing of those acoustic cues that are responsible for syllable final stop consonant voicing in English was studied (i.e. vocalic duration and F1 offset frequency). Altogether nine subjects participated in an identification experiment of which six subjects took part in an active and passive (event-related potential, ERP) discrimination task. The subjects were presented with four different versions of English non-words [bot] and [bod] and their corresponding non-speech analogues as a control condition for the discrimination task. Results showed that the duration cue plays the most important role in British English syllable final stop voicing as measured with both identification and discrimination tasks. However, more data will be reported in the final paper. Keywords: speech perception, cue-weighting, Event-related potentials, mismatch negativity (MMN)