Pind J
Institute of Lexicography, University of Iceland, Reykjavík.
Percept Psychophys. 1995 Apr;57(3):291-304. doi: 10.3758/bf03213055.
The temporal structure of speech has been shown to be highly variable. Speaking rate, stress, and other factors influence the duration of individual speech sounds. The highly elastic nature of speech would seem to pose a problem for the listener, especially with respect to the perception of temporal speech cues such as voice-onset time (VOT) and quantity: How does the listener disentangle those temporal changes which are linguistically significant from those which are extrinsic to the linguistic message? This paper reports data on the behavior of two Icelandic speech cues at different speaking rates. The results show that manipulations of rate have the effect of slightly blurring the distinction between unaspirated and aspirated stops. Despite great changes in the absolute durations of vowels and consonants, the two categories of syllables--V:C and VC:--are nonetheless kept totally distinct. In two perceptual experiments, it is shown that while the ratio of vowel to rhyme duration is the primary cue to quantity and remains invariant at different rates, no such ratio can be defined for VOT. These results imply that quantity is the only one of these two speech cues that is self-normalizing for rate. Models of rate-dependent speech processing need to address this difference.
语音的时间结构已被证明具有高度的变异性。语速、重音和其他因素会影响单个语音的时长。语音的高度弹性本质似乎给听众带来了一个问题，尤其是在感知诸如语音起始时间（VOT）和音长等时间性语音线索方面：听众如何将那些具有语言学意义的时间变化与那些与语言信息无关的变化区分开来？本文报告了关于两种冰岛语语音线索在不同语速下表现的数据。结果表明，语速的变化会略微模糊不送气塞音和送气塞音之间的区别。尽管元音和辅音的绝对时长有很大变化，但两类音节——V:C和VC:——仍然完全区分开来。在两个感知实验中，结果表明，虽然元音与韵部时长的比例是音长的主要线索，并且在不同语速下保持不变，但对于VOT无法定义这样的比例。这些结果意味着，音长是这两种语音线索中唯一一种对语速具有自我归一化作用的线索。依赖语速的语音处理模型需要考虑到这种差异。
