ISCA Archive ICSLP 1992
ISCA Archive ICSLP 1992

A new measure for perceptual weight of acoustic cues: an experiment on voicing in French intervocalic [t,d]

Thomas R. Sawallis

An experiment is presented here concerning perception of edited consonant length, voicing amplitude, and burst+aspiration amplitude in a corpus of natural tokens of French intervocalic [t, d], with the editing designed using the statistical distributions of those cues as previously measured in the selfsame corpus. This design largely preserves the natural variation of the non-target cues. Then, mathematical tools borrowed from signal detection theory [5] are used on the results of these tests to derive perceptual sensitivity measurements for the cues. These measurements can be compared autonomously, without trading-relationship-style equivalences, across cues, environments, and languages. The properties of this type of measurement make it amenable to use not only in speech perception, but also in formal phonology and general linguistics.