A rövid és hosszú zöngétlen explozívák észlelése gyermekeknél és felnőtteknél

Absztrakt

There has been much research indicating that a specific speech sound is characterized by wide variability in timing of articulation. Despite the wide variability and the considerable overlap in the duration of singleton and geminate realisations, it is also confirmed by previous production studies that the primary acoustic attribute that distinguishes geminates from singletons is duration. In speech perception research, it is an essential question how listeners discriminate phonological categories of quantity along a continuous durational scale of the phonetic realisations. This perceptual task seems to be more difficult for children than for adults. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of duration as a perceptual distinction between single and geminate stops using a binary discrimination test of stops with systematically manipulated closure duration. The main question was what kind of similarities and differences can be found between children’ and adults’ perceptual shifts from singleton to geminate. Results confirmed that closure duration is a sufficient and adequate perceptual cue in the distinction of single and geminate stops both in children and adults; however, perceptual shifts differed between children and adults, and depended on the place of articulation. Moreover, displacement of the response curves based on the original quantity of stimuli (originally geminate or originally singleton) indicated that cues other than closure duration may contribute to the length contrast in Hungarian stops.