Relationships between phonetic perceptual and auditory spaces for fricatives

This study investigates the correlations between phonetic, perceptual and auditory spaces of fricatives. These spatial representations are constructed from estimated distances between fricatives in each domain. The present work is an extension of previous studies with vowels, which showed a close association between the auditory and perceptual spaces. The dimensions obtained were highly related to the formant frequencies of the vowels and their phonetic (articulatory) descriptions. However, these findings could have been anticipated due to inherent similarities in articulatory and acoustic forms of vowels. No corresponding relationships for consonants have yet been established, and it is important to investigate whether such relationships might also hold for consonants, since their acoustic form is not so simply linked to their phonetic (articulatory) form. In this study we relate 'places of articulation' for fricatives with their spectral characteristics and perceptual similarities to investigate any articulatory references to their perception. A variety of fricative and fricative-like stimuli were examined. Perceptual distances were derived from subjective judgments of the similarities between the fricatives. Auditory distances were obtained from critical bandpass filter banks and distance metrics were applied to model the spectral processing in the auditory periphery. The distances in the perceptual and auditory spaces were analysed using multidimensional scaling in order to test their correlation and how it varied according to the naturalness of the stimulus materials. The relations between the spaces were measured quantitatively by canonical correlation analyses. The acoustic correlates of these spatial dimensions were also identified. The perceptual dimensions of the most natural fricative stimuli proved to be highly related to both their phonetic (articulatory) and auditory spaces. By demonstrating a link across these domains, the study, therefore, favours perceptual theories of a unified nature, rather than the views based on 'strong articulatory' or 'strong auditory' modes of speech perception.

[1]  H. Winitz,et al.  The distribution of perceptual cues in English prevocalic fricatives. , 1975, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[2]  Björn Lindblom,et al.  Explaining Phonetic Variation: A Sketch of the H&H Theory , 1990 .

[3]  K. Stevens,et al.  On the Properties of Voiceless Fricative Consonants , 1961 .

[4]  B. Rakerd,et al.  Vowels in consonantal context are perceived more linguistically than are isolated vowels: Evidence from an individual differences scaling study , 1984, Perception & psychophysics.

[5]  S. Singh,et al.  Perceptual structure of 12 American English vowels. , 1971, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  D Krull,et al.  Relating acoustic properties to perceptual responses: a study of Swedish voiced stops. , 1990, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  Brian R Glasberg,et al.  Derivation of auditory filter shapes from notched-noise data , 1990, Hearing Research.

[8]  G. A. Miller,et al.  An Analysis of Perceptual Confusions Among Some English Consonants , 1955 .

[9]  Christine H. Shadle,et al.  Articulatory-Acoustic Relationships in Fricative Consonants , 1990 .

[10]  E. B. Andersen,et al.  Modern factor analysis , 1961 .

[11]  B S Atal,et al.  Perceptual differences between vowels located in a limited phonetic space. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  S. Chiba,et al.  Dynamic programming algorithm optimization for spoken word recognition , 1978 .

[13]  S. Singh,et al.  Study of twenty-six intervocalic consonants as spoken and recognized by four language groups. , 1966, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[14]  J E Flege,et al.  The perception of English and Spanish vowels by native English and Spanish listeners: a multidimensional scaling analysis. , 1995, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[15]  S Singh,et al.  Perceptual structure of 22 prevocalic English consonants. , 1972, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[16]  G. E. Peterson,et al.  The Phonetic Value of Vowels , 1951 .

[17]  H M Sussman.  The Representation of Stop Consonants in Three-Dimensional Acoustic Space , 1991, Phonetica.

[18]  A. M. D. de Manrique,et al.  Acoustic analysis and perception of Spanish fricative consonants. , 1981, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[19]  A. Jongman.  Duration of frication noise required for identification of English fricatives. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[20]  R. Plomp,et al.  Perceptual and physical space of vowel sounds. , 1969, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[21]  K. Stevens.  Evidence for the role of acoustic boundaries in the perception of speech sounds , 1981 .

[22]  B. Lindblom,et al.  Modeling the judgment of vowel quality differences. , 1981, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[23]  J. D. Miller,et al.  Auditory-perceptual interpretation of the vowel. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[24]  R. Verbrugge,et al.  Linguistic and acoustic correlates of the perceptual structure found in an individual differences scaling study of vowels. , 1985, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[25]  A. Wilgus,et al.  High quality time-scale modification for speech , 1985, ICASSP '85. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[26]  W. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  The temporal structure of spoken language understanding , 1980, Cognition.

[27]  V. Mann,et al.  Influence of vocalic context on perception of the [∫]-[s] distinction , 1978 .

[28]  K. Harris.  Cues for the Discrimination of American English Fricatives in Spoken Syllables , 1958 .

[29]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Invariant cues for place of articulation in stop consonants. , 1978, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[30]  C. Fowler.  An event approach to the study of speech perception from a direct realist perspective , 1986 .

[31]  R Plomp,et al.  Objective analysis versus subjective assessment of vowels pronounced by deaf and normal-hearing children. , 1995, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[32]  B. Repp.  Phonetic trading relations and context effects: new experimental evidence for a speech mode of perception. , 1982, Psychological bulletin.

[33]  E Paulus,et al.  Automatic speech recognition using psychoacoustic models. , 1979, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[34]  P. Denes.  On the Motor Theory of Speech Perception , 1965 .

[35]  Takeshi Kitagawa,et al.  An Introduction to the , 1998 .

[36]  K. Wilson.  Multidimensional analyses of confusions of English consonants. , 1963, The American journal of psychology.

[37]  R A Fox,et al.  Perceptual Structure of Monophthongs and Diphthongs in English , 1983, Language and speech.

[38]  F. Cooper,et al.  FORMANT TRANSITIONS AND LOCI AS ACOUSTIC CORRELATES OF PLACE OF ARTICULATION IN AMERICAN FRICATIVES , 1962 .

[39]  P. Arabie,et al.  Auditory versus phonetic accounts of observed confusions between consonant phonemes. , 1979, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[40]  J. Chang,et al.  Analysis of individual differences in multidimensional scaling via an n-way generalization of “Eckart-Young” decomposition , 1970 .

[41]  D. Klatt.  Review of selected models of speech perception , 1989 .

[42]  H. S. Gopal,et al.  A perceptual model of vowel recognition based on the auditory representation of American English vowels. , 1986, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[43]  V. Mann,et al.  Perceptual order and the effect of vocalic context on fricative perception , 1991, Perception & psychophysics.

[44]  R Plomp,et al.  Objective analysis versus subjective assessment of vowels pronounced by native, non-native, and deaf male speakers of Dutch. , 1993, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[45]  Jeffrey L. Elman,et al.  Interactive processes in speech perception: the TRACE model , 1986 .

[46]  J. Kruskal.  Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis , 1964 .

[47]  Q. Summerfield,et al.  Modeling the perception of concurrent vowels: vowels with the same fundamental frequency. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[48]  Han-Yong. You.  An acoustic and perceptual study of English fricatives , 1979 .

[49]  Dennis H. Klatt,et al.  Prediction of perceived phonetic distance from critical-band spectra: A first step , 1982, ICASSP.

[50]  W. Klein,et al.  Vowel spectra, vowel spaces, and vowel identification. , 1970, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[51]  Rolf Carlson,et al.  Vowel perception: The relative perceptual salience of selected spectral and waveform manipulations , 1979 .

[52]  Quentin Summerfield,et al.  The auditory representation of symmetrical CVC syllables , 1986, Speech Commun..