In Proc. of the Japan-China Joint Conference of Acoustics, Sendai, 2007
Perceiving continuum of voiceless affricate/fricative by changing rise time of consonant for elderly and younger participants
K. Yasu, T. Arai, K. Kobayashi and M. Shindo
Abstract: We have conducted the perception test of voiceless affricate/fricative by changing the rise time of the consonant from long (/S/) to short (/tS/) in elderly listeners [Proc. Spring Meet. Acoust. Soc. Jpn., pp. 487-488, 2006]. The stimuli we used were made using the methods of Howell and Rosen [J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 73, No. 3, 1983]. We have previously found that elderly listeners perceived the long voiceless fricatives as short affricate when compared to younger listeners. The response curves of /tS/ for elderly participants were less steep than those of younger participants. In the current study, we created stimuli with and without vowel to investigate the effect of backward masking by the following vowel. We used steady-state suppression to suppress the vowel. Also, we artificially expanded the rise time of voiceless fricative /S/ and made a wider continuum range than our previous study. The purpose of this was to create a wider response curve of /tS/ so we could determine the difference between a short- and long-ranged continuum. Ten elderly and 24 younger participants took part in a perceptual experiment. Results showed that elderly participants perceived consonants in a shorter rise time than younger participants. There were no differences among consonant with vowel, without vowel, and processed steady-state suppression. We could not determine the effect of backward masking by the following vowel.