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Detection times for vowels versus consonants.
Authors:
van Ooyen, B., Cutler, A., & Norris, D.
Reference:
In Eurospeech 91: Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Vol. 3 (pp. 1451-1454). Genova, Italy, 24-26 September.
Year of publication:
1991
CBU number:
2642
Abstract:
This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusable stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with measured target phoneme length. In the second experiment, using an identical paradigm, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with their corresponding semivowels. This time, the vowels were responded to faster than the semivowels. We conclude that response time differences between vowels and stop consonants in this task may reflect differences between phoneme categories in the variability of tokens, both in the realisation of targets in the materials and in the representation of targets by subjects.
