The perception of medial stop contrasts in Central Standard Swedish: a pilot study

This paper investigates the perceptual significance of preaspiration in Swedish. Six minimal word pairs were recorded from a male speaker of Central Standard Swedish who had been observed to produce word-medial fortis stops with considerable preaspiration. Each word pair contrasted a sequence of a CV + long fortis stop and a CV + long lenis stop. The CV sequences were then excised from the signal, normalised and presented to 16 listeners, whose task it was to identify the word from which the sequence had been excised. The results show that words with a fortis stop are much easier to identify on the basis of vowel information alone than are words with a lenis stop. This is taken to suggest that preaspiration noise (with a concomitant early voice offset) is highly relevant as a stop cue in Swedish.