Disambiguation of segmental dependencies by extended phonetic context

Investigated the recognition of adjacent vowels and consonants that are conveyed in part by a common temporal cue, vowel duration. 10 native speakers of American English participated in Exp 1, which examined the effect of vowel identity, fricative identity, and contextual factors on vowel duration, voiced-frication duration, and voiceless-frication duration in speech production, and the potential effectiveness of these durational measures as classification cues. In Exp 2, 12 university students identified the syllables after they had been excised from a sentence. Accuracy in recognizing /s/ varied with the inherent duration of the preceding vowel, with the number of errors increasing with inherent vowel duration. In Exp 3, 12 listeners heard the syllables in a sentence. Accuracy improved, and no relation was found between inherent vowel duration and accuracy in recognizing /s/.