| Popis: |
The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which closure duration of obstruents (CDO) followed by a vowel (C₁) and intensity of words affect the perception of a vowel in legal (V₁C₁UC₂V₂) and illegal (V₁C₁C₂V₂) phonotactic contexts by native Japanese speakers. Four sets of non-words that include legal and illegal phonotactic contexts (e.g., / ebzo / and / ebuzo/) were manipulated with respect to the closure duration of C1 in four steps (25%, 50%, 75% and 100%) and intensity of the whole word in four steps (+3 dB and +6 dB, -3 dB and -6 dB), and a total of 200 sound stimuli were thus created for a forced-choice task. Twenty native Japanese speakers identified whether a given sound stimulus had a vowel or not. The results showed that the Japanese participants tended not to perceive a vowel when CDO was completely deleted and when intensity was low, and the effects on perception by the native Japanese speakers were even greater when the two factors were combined. |
