RE Remez, PE Rubin, DB Pisoni, TD Carrell
Speech perception without traditional speech cues
Science 22 May 1981:
Vol. 212 no. 4497 pp. 947-949
Abs: A three-tone sinusoidal replica of a naturally produced utterance was identified by listeners, despite the readily apparent unnatural speech quality of the signal. The time-varying properties of these highly artificial acoustic signals are apparently sufficient to support perception of the linguistic message in the absence of traditional acoustic cues for phonetic segments.
Two issues were raised in today’s discussion. One was how well sine waves can actually represent fricative and stop consonants, which may not have clearcut formants. The other issue was to what extend the sine wave speech contained short-term temporal envelopes, which we know can support speech perception as well.