Title: The role of consonant cluster voicing in a syllable count task
Abstract: It has been observed that listeners report hearing vowels between sequences of consonants that do not occur adjacently in their native language. The origin of these so-called “illusory vowels” is a topic of debate; some scholars attribute the illusion to active phonological processes in the language that serve to repair illicit phonological strings, while others suggest that fine-grained phonetic details can lead to differential parses of the acoustic signal. The present study closely examines the role of voicing in the perception of Russian pseudowords with naturalistic stop-stop onset clusters. English listeners without knowledge of Russian were presented with disyllabic and trisyllabic pseudowords and were asked to respond how many syllables they perceived in each stimulus. Disyllabic words with voiced onsets were frequently misidentified as trisyllabic, suggesting voicing does indeed play a role in the perception of equally illicit onsets. Furthermore, an unanticipated difference in performance by place of articulation of the first stop suggests that fine-grained details in the realization of stop bursts play a role in the perception of syllables. These results provide support for a phonetic-based account of illusory vowels over a phonological repair account.