Miller J L
Phonetica. 1981;38(1-3):159-80. doi: 10.1159/000260021.
This paper reviews a series of studies on the effects of variation in speaking rate on phonetic perception, in particular, on the identification of /b/ and /w/ in syllable-initial position. The major finding of these studies was that in a variety of tasks listeners adjusted for speaking rate when using the duration of the initial formant transitions to distinguish between /b/ and /w/: At slower rates of speech, a longer transition was needed to hear /w/ rather than /b/, and conversely at faster rates of speech. This effect occurred when rate was specified by the duration and acoustic-phonetic structure of the syllable containing the target consonant and, to a more limited extent, when it was specified by the duration of a subsequent syllable. Moreover, the influence of syllable duration on the processing of transition duration was also evident in young, prearticulate infants, suggesting that at least the rudiments of a system that provides perceptual constancy across rate is part of the linguistic endowment of the infant.
本文综述了一系列关于语速变化对语音感知影响的研究，特别是关于音节起始位置的 /b/ 和 /w/ 的识别。这些研究的主要发现是，在各种任务中，听众在利用起始共振峰过渡的时长来区分 /b/ 和 /w/ 时会根据语速进行调整：在语速较慢时，需要更长的过渡才能听到 /w/ 而非 /b/，反之在语速较快时也是如此。当语速由包含目标辅音的音节的时长和声学语音结构确定时，以及在更有限的程度上，当语速由后续音节的时长确定时，这种效应都会出现。此外，音节时长对过渡时长处理的影响在年幼的、尚未开始发音的婴儿中也很明显，这表明至少一个能在不同语速下提供感知恒常性的系统的雏形是婴儿语言天赋的一部分。
