Identification of vowel features from French stop bursts

Deals with the perception of vowels from French stop bursts. The corpus was made up of 90 stimuli of 20-25 ms duration extracted from natural CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) and CV words. The syllables combined the initial stops /p,t,k/ with the vowels /i,a,u/. In order to cut off all traces of vocalic segment, bursts whose duration was too short were lengthened. Eight native speakers of French served as listeners in the experiment. The results showed that a burst onset which did not contain any traces of vocalic segment provided substantial vocalic information (the overall identification rate was 80%). The vowel /i/ was clearly identified from /t/ and /k/, and the vowel /u/ very clearly identified from /k/. The vowel /a/, with high identification rate, was often chosen in the absence of a clear vocalic timbre