Perception of Electronically Gated Speech

Eight normally hearing adult subjects were asked to identify a word spoken in a phrase when part of the word was deleted using an electronic gating device. The four words cap, cat, cab and cash were used with the carrier phrase, " Point to .... " Each phrase was uttered 50 times by one male and one female adult speaker. The 50 utterances of each phrase were gated electronically at five different intervals through the /æ/ sound. Thus there were ten repetitions at each gating interval for each speaker for each phrase. All utterances were presented to the subjects in random order. The following results were found: (1) The subjects were able to identify the words cat, cap and cab correctly at a greater than chance level half way through the vowel. (2) The percentage of correct responses to these three words increased progressively with increase in the amount of the vowel presented. (3) The word cash differed from the other words in that it appeared that some of the final consonant had to be presented before the word was identified and also in that subjects seldom guessed at that word as an incorrect response.