Discrimination of Differences in Digitally Manipulated Phoneme Length during Speech

Abstract

The present study investigated differences in the thresholds of phoneme duration in word and sentence contexts by participants' sex. In the word condition, 27 participants listened to two pairs of words in a dual pair discrimination task. One pair contained the same durations of /s/, and the other pair contained different durations of /s/. Participants were to select the pair which contained different durations of /s/ in the words. In the sentence condition, the other set of 27 participants listened to two pairs of sentences and selected the pair containing different durations of /s/ in the sentences. Throughout these tasks, the participants' just-noticeable-difference and trials-to-completion were analyzed. The results showed that the participants demonstrated better performance in detecting just-noticeable-difference in the sentence condition than in the word condition. In addition, a sex difference was found in just-noticeable-difference in both conditions with better performance in men than women. No significant differences in trials-to-completion were found in either condition.