Hiroaki KATO, Minoru TSUZAKI, Yoshinori SAGISAKA
Contextual effects on acceptability for
modification of segmental duration in words
Abstract:The acceptability of temporal naturalness was measured for various vowel segments
in isolated words by modifying original segmental durations. A large-size perceptual
experiment employing 1462 stimuli of 70 segments revealed that word acceptability
is affected by the segment attributes and context such as the position in a word,
phoneme type, and tone accent. An ANOVA test demonstrated that the acceptable
range of temporal modification was narrower (1) for the first moraic segment in a
word than for the third one, (2) for vowel /a/ than for vowel /i/, and (3) for high-tone
segments than for low-tone segments; the effect of (3) was the weakest of the three.
An additional experiment showed that the position in a word and phoneme type also
affected the temporal discrimination threshold consistently, suggesting that they
function at a perceptual stage.