Context‐conditioned specification of vowel identity

Consonantal environment does not aid vowel identification universally, but preserves and sharpens the information for vowels differentially. In a vowel recognition task, listeners heard one of two test series: /pVp/ syllables or isolated vowels. The test items were spoken by a single male talker and contained a balanced distribution of the vowels /i, ɪ, e, ae, a, ɔ, ʌ, ᴜ, u/. During each block of 90 test trials, listeners targeted for one of the nine vowel types, checking “Yes” when they recognized an instance and “No” otherwise. For both misses and false alarms, there was a strong interaction between vowel type (close versus open) and context type (/pVp/ vs /V/). The open vowel pairs (/ɛ/ae/ , /ʌ/a/) showed consistently superior recognition in the /pVp/ consonantal environment; others did not. Asymmetries in confusion errors were observed for several vowel pairs in both environments. A dynamic articulatory model of the syllable can provide a parsimonious account for these effects. Listeners may be sensitive to acoustic patterning that specifies vowels as dynamic gestures; vowel recognition will vary in precision depending on how the consonantal envirionment structures the dynamic information in sound. [Research supported by NIH grant HD‐01994 to Haskins Laboratories.]