Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Discriminability And Perceptual Saliency Of Temporal And Spectral Cues For Final Fricative Consonant Voicing In Simulated Cochlear-Implant And Bimodal Hearing, Ying-Yee Kong, Matthew B. Winn, Katja Poelmann, Gail S. Donaldson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Publications

Multiple redundant acoustic cues can contribute to the perception of a single phonemic contrast. This study investigated the effect of spectral degradation on the discriminability and perceptual saliency of acoustic cues for identification of word-final fricative voicing in “loss” versus “laws”, and possible changes that occurred when low-frequency acoustic cues were restored. Three acoustic cues that contribute to the word-final /s/-/z/ contrast (first formant frequency [F1] offset, vowel–consonant duration ratio, and consonant voicing duration) were systematically varied in synthesized words. A discrimination task measured listeners’ ability to discriminate differences among stimuli within a single cue dimension. A categorization task examined …