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Vowels as phoneme detection targets.
Authors:
Cutler, A., Norris, D. & van Ooyen, B.
Reference:
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Vol. 1 (pp. 581-584), Kobe, Japan.
Year of publication:
1990
CBU number:
2526
Abstract:
Phoneme detection is a psycholinguistic task in which listeners' response time to detect the presence of a pre-specified phoneme target is measured. Typically, detection tasks have used consonant targets. This paper reports two experiments in which subjects responded to vowels as phoneme detection targets. In the first experiment, targets occurred in real words, in the second in nonsense words. Response times were long by comparison with consonantal targets. Targets in initial syllables were responded to much more slowly than targets in second syllables. Strong vowels were responded to faster than reduced vowels in real words but not in nonwords. These results suggest that the process of phoneme detection produces different results for vowels and for consonants. We discuss possible explanations for this difference, in particular the possibility of language-specificity.
