Perception of synthetic nasal consonants in initial and final syllable position

Abstract

Identification and discrimination of synthesized syllable-initial and syllable-final nasal consonants (/mæ-næ-ηæ/ and æm-æn-æη) by adult American subjects were assessed to determine (1) whether place-of-articulation contrasts in nasals, cued only by second and third formant transition variations, were perceived categorically, and (2) if linguistic experience affected_ the perception of this acoustic dimension. In two experiments, subjects produced consistent identification functions with sharp boundaries between familiar phoneme categories. Corresponding discrimination functions showed "peaks" of relatively accurate perception for cross-category comparison pairs, indicating categorical perception. Identification consistency and discrimination accuracy were inferior for the/n/-/η/ contrast in the unfamiliar (and phonologically inappropriate) syllable-initial condition compared to the familiar syllable-final condition. No such difference was found in identification and discrimination of the acoustically comparable oral stop consonant contrast/d/-/g/in syllable-initial and syllable-final position. These results provide evidence that perception of linguistically relevant acoustic dimensions by adults is constrained, at least in part, by their familiarity with those acoustic (and phonetic) contrasts in specific phonological contexts. © 1978 Psychonomic Society, Inc.