Identification Of Voiced Stop Consonants Produced By Acoustically Driven Vocal Tract Modulations

A recently developed speech production model, in which speech segments are specified by relative acoustic events called resonance deflection patterns, was used to generate speech signals that were presented to listeners in a perceptual test. The purpose was to determine the effect of variations of the magnitude and polarity of the third resonance deflection on identification of the consonant in a V1CV2 disyllable while the deflections of the first and second resonances were held constant. Result showed that listeners' identification changed from /d/ to /g/ when the polarity of the third resonance deflection switched from positive to negative.