Identification of deleted plosives: The effect of adding noise or applying a time window (a reply of Ohde and sharf).

A Letter in this Journal [Ohde, R. N. and Sharf, D. J., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 69, 297-300 (1981)] deals with the identification of voiced and voiceless stops from vocalic transition + vowel stimuli edited from CV and VC syllables. The segmentation points were smoothed by applying a time window. With respect to an earlier study, in which straightforward segmentation without time window was applied, final plosives were still identified better than initial plosives. The present Letter shows that there is, however, one major difference between the with-window and the no-window condition, namely a substantial improvement in identification for initial voiced plosives. This improvement is similar to that found by the present authors in identification experiments with a noise burst adjacent to the segmentation point versus no-noise listening conditions. Instead of a controversy reported by Ohde and Sharf, this Letter suggests a unifying interpretation.