On the temporal aspect of post-consonantal F0 perturbation in English voicing perception

The results in Experiment 3 suggested that the falling time of the F0 contour can affect English listeners' identification of stop voicing. Specifically, listeners identified Step 5, of which the F0 starts at 280 Hz and falls to the baseline F0 after 50% of the total vowel duration, more often as voiceless in noise than Step 4, of which the F0 starts at 280 Hz and falls to the baseline F0 after 25% of the total vowel duration. This experiment (i.e., Experiment 4) aims to confirm and elucidate this timing effect. We created four F0 contours by fixing the onset F0 and varying the slopes. Two slopes in this experiment, Slope 4′ and Slope 5′, are the same as Steps 4 and 5 at the midpoint VOT value in Experiment 3, respectively. One other slope is the midpoint between Slope 4′ and Slope 5′. The last one is larger than Slope 4′, and its difference from Slope 4′ is the same as half of the difference between Slope 4′ and Slope 5′. Please see the Praat script for the details of stimuli construction.