The Role of Release Bursts in Final Stop Perception
Paul Marty
July 2012 

The absence of release bursts in final stops has often been proposed as the factor responsible for the neutralization of place contrasts. Specifically, in languages where final stops are never released (e.g., Cantonese), it has been observed that place contrasts neutralize when formant patterns are acoustically too similar (e.g., up^-uk^). This paper focuses on the role of release bursts in phonological structure and speech perception by investigating how native speakers of French, a language where final stops are always released, perceive bursteless stops. Results support the view that release bursts are not only useful, but critical to place distinctions in environments where formant transitions alone would be insufficiently distinct. Results also reveal that, when perceptual confusion occurs, French listeners default neither to the linguistically unmarked value, nor to the most frequent value in context. Rather, they overwhelmingly default to the place feature for which the release burst is most similar acoustically to no burst at all. Within a production-perception grammar, I propose an account in terms of cue weighting, modulated by listeners' expectations about the presence of the relevant place cues.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003889 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of CLS48
keywords:	release bursts, final stops, place of articulation, place contrasts, perceptual cues, speech perception, phonology
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