The Acoustic Cue of the Perception of Devoiced Vowels after /p/

Abstract

This paper presents the results of experiments to reveal the acoustic cue of the perception of devoiced vowels. The frequency spectrum of mora /pI/ and /pU/ has peaks at 3200Hz and 1500Hz respectively. I removed these peaks using the band-pass filter to create stimuli. In the perception test using these stimuli, the rate of correct response is extremely low. This suggests that participants of this test couldn't use the acoustic information mentioned above. These acoustic features of/pI/ and /pU/ are similar to those of/p/ before voiced vowels. This result suggests that the coarticulation between /p/ and the following vowel may act as the acoustic cue of devoiced vowels.