Identification of vocalic features from French stop bursts

Article dans revue scientifique avec comité de lecture.This paper deals with the perception of vocalic features from French stop bursts. The corpus was made up of 90 stimuli of 20-25 ms duration extracted from natural monosyllabic words which combined the initial stops /p,t,k/ with the vowels /i,a,u/. In order to cut off all traces of the following vowel, bursts whose duration was less than 20-25 ms were lengthened. Eight listeners identified the vocalic context under training condition, eight others under lack of training condition. Results showed that the burst onset provided substantial vocalic information (the overall identification rate was 80\% under training condition). Under both conditions, the vowel /i/ was clearly identified from /t/ and /k/, and the vowel /u/ was very clearly identified from /k/. Knowledge about coarticulation in stop-vowel sequences and its effects on bursts acoustics was used in order to find articulatory phenomena and acoustical patterns which could explain the identification of vowels from bursts