Prosodic information for vowel identity

Earlier research suggests that prosodic information is utilized by listeners in identifying vowels. The effects of variation in stress and tempo need to be distinguished. In this study, an adult male talker recorded nine American English monophthongs in /p—p/ syllables in each of four sentence contexts: two levels of syllable stress (stressed, destressed) were crossed with two rates of sentence articulation (slow, fast). Listeners made more errors when identifying syllables in isolation (average of 15% errors) than in sentence context (5%). Errors on the isolated syllables showed a bias toward “short” vowels, suggesting that the effective tempo perceived by listeners was slower than appropriate. Tokens of each syllable type were interchanged between sentence pairs so as to misinform listeners about the syllables' tempo and stress value. When tempo was mismatched, errors increased substantially on the fast syllables, showing a bias toward shorter vowels. No change was found when stressed and destressed syl...