Coarticulation Effects of Post-Consonantal Vowels On the Short-Term Recall of Pre-Consonantal Vowels

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to see whether, in a vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) nonsense word, the pre-consonantal acoustic effects of the post-consonantal vowel could influence the short-term recall of the pre-consonantal vowel. Recordings were made by a male speaker of VC and VCV utterances in which the six lax vowels of American English were the initial vowels, /t/ was the consonant, and /I/ and /α/ were the final vowels. By editing out the final vowels of some of the utterances, five conditions were produced: (1) control-Vt; (2) final /I/ deleted—Vt/I, (3) final /α/ deleted—Vt/α, (4) final /I/ retained—VtI; and (5) final /α/ retained—Vtα. These utterances were presented to listeners in lists of six for short-term recall of the initial vowels. Frequency of errors and distribution of errors based on feature analysis of the vowels were calculated. Statistical analysis showed that coarticulation effects did influence per cent recall scores but not error distribution. It was concluded that coarticulation effects probably influence the certainty with which vowel identifications are made but not the specification of features which determine the identification.