The role of vowel transitions and frication noise in the perception of Polish sibilants

Polish is one of the few languages that contrast sibilant fricatives and affricates at three different places of articulation (dental, retroflex and alveopalatal). This paper examines the relative contribution of the information contained in the fricative noise and in the adjacent vowels to the recognition of these consonants by native speakers of the language. It is shown that while isolated fricatives of all types are identified reliably, the removal of transitional cues in the second vowel in VCV words makes alveopalatals and retroflexes very confusable. In addition, a detailed acoustic analysis of data from one native speaker is presented.