Perceptual assessment of coarticulation in sequences of two stop consonants

This study investigated whether any perceptually useful coarticulatory information is carried by the release bursts and formant transitions of two successive, nonhomorganic stop consonants. The VC or CV portions of natural VCCV utterances were replaced with matched synthetic stimuli from a VC or CV continuum spanning the three places of stop articulation. When the VC and CV portions in the resulting hybrid VCCV stimuli were separated by a fixed silent interval, the context in which the natural portion has been produced had no influence on listeners' identification of the synthetic portion, suggesting that VC and CV formant transitions and CV release bursts contained no perceptually salient coarticulatory cues. However, when a natural VC portion was separated from a synthetic CV portion by the original closure interval, which included a brief release burst of the first stop, there was a sizeable effect of the original CV context on the perception of the second stop consonant. Thus the release burst of a syllable-final stop contains significant coarticulatory information about a following, nonhomorganic stop. The data also revealed contrast effects and other perceptual interactions between two successive stop consonants. This report will include results of an acoustic analysis of the stimuli. [Research supported by NICHD and BRS.]