Vowel quality decay and perceptual asymmetries in light of the neutralisation hypothesis

Charalampos Karypidis (1) , Antonia Colazo-Simon (1)

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

The present paper consists in replicating Repp and Crowder's (1990) neutralisation hypothesis according to which the auditory trace left by the first vowel in a pair decays toward a central point in the acoustic space, triggering order effects in perception. Two 'same-different' tasks were undertaken by French listeners. A prototype and four satellite tokens were synthesized for ten vowel categories of French; satellites were paired with the prototype in both orders of presentation. The focus of the two tasks undertaken was the possibility of [ǝ] being a target of decay for auditory traces on the F1/F2 and F2/F3 acoustic space. Results from both tasks failed to validate the initial hypothesis.

Mots clés: vowel; decay; asymmetries; NEUTRALISATION

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie

Charalampos Karypidis, Antonia Colazo-Simon. Vowel quality decay and perceptual asymmetries in light of the neutralisation hypothesis. Fechner Day 2010, Oct 2010, Padova, Italy. pp.351-356. ⟨halshs-00675873⟩