Speaking rate, voice-onset time, and quantity: the search for higher-order invariants for two Icelandic speech cues.

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.