Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Perceptual restoration is a well-known phenomenon for speech segments in context, but less is known about the effect for stimuli that occur without a linguistic context. The current study investigated restoration in the perception of isolated vowels. Vowels excised from natural speech were lowpass filtered (1000 Hz), which removed the high F₂ characteristic of front vowels. This resulted in high rates of front to back vowel confusions; however, these errors were reduced when highpass filtered noise was added to the lowpass filtered vowels. Although the reduction in errors was accompanied by an increase in back to front vowel errors, addition of noise led to improved performance overall. These results suggest that listeners “restored” the high F₂ of front vowels in the noise condition, despite an absence of linguistic context to influence restoration, and that addition of noise led to more effective utilization of cues below 1000 Hz.

Keywords

perceptual restoration vowel perception

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bashford, J.A. , and Warren, R.M. (1979). Perceptual synthesis of deleted phonemes. In J.J. Wolf and D.H. Klatt (eds.), Speech Communication Papers (pp. 423–426). New York: Acoustical Society of America.

Bashford, J.A. , and Warren, R.M. (1987). Effects of spectral alternation on the intelligibility of words and sentences. Perception & Psychophysics, 42, 431–438.

Bregman, A.S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bregman, A.S. , and Dannenbring, G.L. (1977). Auditory continuity and amplitude edges. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 31, 151–159.

Egan, J.P. (1948). The effect of noise in one ear upon the loudness of speech in the other. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 20, 58–62.

Houtgast, T. (1972). Psychophysical evidence for lateral inhibition in hearing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 51, 1885–1894.

Lehiste, I. , and Peterson, G.E. (1959). The identification of filtered vowels. Phonetica, 4, 161–177.

Miller, G.A. , and Licklider, J.C.R. (1950). The intelligibility of interrupted speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 22, 167–173.

Ohala, J.J. (1986). Against the direct realist view of speech perception. Journal of Phonetics, 14, 75–82.

10.

Ohala, J.J. , and Shriberg, E.E. (1990). Hypercorrection in speech perception. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 1, 405–408. Kobe, Japan: Acoustical Society of Japan.

11.

Shriberg, E.E. (1990). Phantom formants: Hypercorrection in vowel identification as evidence against the direct realist view of speech perception. M.A. thesis, University of California at Berkeley.

12.

Thurlow, W.R. , and Elfner, L.F. (1959). Continuity effects with alternately sounding tones. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 31, 1337–1339.

13.

Warren, R.M. (1970). Perceptual restoration of missing speech sounds. Science, 167, 392–393.

14.

Warren, R.M. (1982). Auditory Perception: A New Synthesis. New York: Pergamon.

15.

Warren, R.M. , and Bashford, J.A. (1976). Auditory contralateral induction: An early stage in binaural processing. Perception & Psychophysics, 20, 380–386.

16.

Warren, R.M. , and Sherman, G.L. (1974). Phonemic restoration based on subsequent context. Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 150–156.

17.

Wertheimer, M. (1912). Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 61, 161–265.

Perceptual Restoration of Filtered Vowels with Added Noise

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References