9415498 This study will conduct an acoustic and perceptual phonetic investigation of the syllable in Tsou, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. Tsou has been chosen because the range of syllable onset consonant clusters that it permits is rarely attested in other languages. This makes Tsou an ideal language for the main goal of this study: determining the role that perception plays in shaping syllable structure. It has been proposed that syllable structure is due in large part to demands that the perceptual system places on language. It is the hypothesis of this study that speakers of Tsou produce the exceptional syllable onset clusters in such a way as to maximize the cues to the presence of both the first and second consonant. To test this hypothesis, an acoustic and a perceptual study will be carried out in Taiwan. The acoustic study will examine in detail the characteristics of consonant release bursts and formant transitions of Tsou consonant clusters as well as singleton consonants. A set of perceptual experiments will follow up the results of the acoustic studies. The stimuli will be made using digital editing. The experiments will include stimuli made by excising the first burst in a consonant cluster, and splicing a burst from a cluster into a position preceding a singleton burst. The experiments will use a forced choice paradigm in which the listeners will be asked to identify the stimuli as a word with a simple onset or a word with a cluster onset. The goal of such experiments is to test the hypothesis that the release burst alone contains sufficient information to alter the percept on the part of the listener. It will also determine the degree to which formant transitions contribute to the consonant percept in onset clusters.
