Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2005-187, pp. 17-22, 2006
Perceptual weighting of syllable-initial fricatives for native Japanese adults and for children with persistent developmental articulation disorders
S. Hirai, K. Yasu, T. Arai and K. Iitaka
Abstract: We discuss the perceptual weighting of syllable-initial fricatives for native Japanese adults and for children with persistent developmental articulation disorder to elucidate the mechanism behind the disorder and to identify an effective treatment. Forty-two native Japanese adults and 2 native Japanese children with persistent developmental articulation disorder identified tokens from a /sh/-/s/ continuum followed by /a/ with formant transitions changing continuously as /sha/ or /sa/. Most adults weighted to the spectrum of the fricative noise more than to formant transition in the same manner as English native adults, however, a small number of adults and the 2 children judged based more on the formant transitions than on the spectrum of the fricative noise like 3- to 4-year-old typically developing children (Nittrouer & Miller, 1997b). The perceptual weight assigned by adults suggested that they did not perceive uniformly, and those assigned by the 2 children indicated that their speech perception ability might develop differently from that of typically developing children because of speech processing deficits.
Keywords: speech perception, fricatives, acoustic cues, native Japanese speaker, developmental change, developmental articulation disorder