The Perception of Syllable Affiliation of Singleton Stops in Repetitive Speech

Stetson (1951) noted that repeating singleton coda consonants at fast speech rates makes them be perceived as onset consonants affiliated with a following vowel. The current study documents the perception of rate-induced resyllabification, as well as what temporal properties give rise to the perception of syllable affiliation. Stimuli were extracted from a previous study of repeated stop + vowel and vowel + stop syllables (de Jong, 2001a, 2001b). Forced-choice identification tasks show that slow repetitions are clearly distinguished. As speakers increase rate, they reach a point after which listeners disagree as to the affiliation of the stop. This pattern is found for voiced and voiceless consonants using different stimulus extraction techniques. Acoustic models of the identifications indicate that the sudden shift in syllabification occurs with the loss of an acoustic hiatus between successive syllables. Acoustic models of the fast rate identifications indicate various other qualities, such as consonant voicing, affect the probability that the consonants will be perceived as onsets. These results indicate a model of syllabic affiliation where specific juncture-marking aspects of the signal dominate parsing, and in their absence other differences provide additional, weaker cues to syllabic affiliation.