Perception of French stop bursts, implications for stop identification

An experiment is presented here concerning perception of release bursts in a corpus of natural tokens of French /p,t,k/ in CV context. The focus of the study was the perceptual role of spectral characteristics of the release burst; therefore tokens have the same duration of nearly 25 ms so that neither VOT nor formant transitions may innuence listeners. Two training sessions appeared to be necessary to reach the utmost of listeners' ability to identify stops. Results show that the recognition rate are approximately the same for /p/ (89%), /t/ (87%) and /k/ (86%). More precisely, identiication of /k/ in the context of a front vowel is not so high (75%) and is often confused with /t/; /k/ in the context of a back vowel is very well identiied (98%). /t/in the context of /y/ or // is confused (22%) with /k/. These very high identiication rates militate in favour of acoustical invariants, even if, in some cases (for example in the context of a back vowel), the knowledge of the subsequent vowel may help the stop identiication. Therefore, in order to provide further indication concerning the design of an analytical stop recognition system we plan to examine the role of prior knowledge of the subsequent vowel type.