Abstract:
Perception of duration is critically influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context. However, to what
extent this speaking rate normalization is talker-specific is understudied. This experiment investigated whether Japanese listeners’
perception of temporally contrastive phonemes is influenced by the speaking rate of the surrounding context, and
more importantly, whether the effect of the contextual speaking rate persists across different talkers for different types of contrasts:
a singleton-geminate stop contrast and short-long vowel contrast in Japanese. The results suggest that listeners generalized
their rate-based adjustments to different talkers’ speech regardless of whether the target contrasts depended on silent
closure duration or vowel duration. Our results thus support the view that speaking rate normalization is an obligatory process
that happens in the early phase of perception.