Effects of wide dynamic range compression on stop consonant place of articulation

The present study was conducted to determine if wide dynamic range compression alters listeners' perception of place of articulation when relative amplitude of a stop consonant and a vowel is manipulated synthetically and if so, does the Quantal Theory explain any differences found in listeners' perception of place of articulation.The stimuli for this investigation were synthetic consonant-vowel (CV) syllables generated by a PC softwareversion of Klatt's cascade/parallel formant synthesizer using a sampling rate of 10 kHz. Twenty-five subjects ranging in age from 22 to 35 years participated in this experiment.Eight of the 25 subjects perceived more /p/ than /t/for the processed condition. 7 of the 25 subjects perceived more /t/ than /p/ for the processed condition and can be explained by the Quantal Theory. Ten of the subjects had consistent changes between the unprocessed and processed stimuli. A plausible explanation for the 10 subjects that did not have significantly different perception of place of articulation is that perhaps those listeners' cue into formant transition changes that were not altered in this study.