Practice question · True or false
The perception of voice onset time is continuous: listeners hear a gradual change across the VOT range.
Hints
- Consider what happens when listeners are given a continuum of stimuli.
- They report two categories with a sharp switch.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. Perception is categorical: a continuum of VOT values is heard as two categories with an abrupt boundary, and listeners discriminate pairs that straddle the boundary far better than equally spaced pairs within a category. The effect is one of the foundational results of speech perception research.
Practise The Acoustics of Speech
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