What is the reference that sound durations are compared with in speech perception?

Speech segment durations are widely used as cues in the phonetic interpretation of speech (during its perception). To devise a system of quantitative rules for the automatic phonetic interpretation of natural speech it is necessary to know with what reference the speech sound duration is to be compared. An experiment with a specially arranged set of stimuli has shown that durations of adjacent sounds in an utterance, namely vowels, are used as the reference for word stress perception in Russian.

[Pause perception in a speech-like signal].

The perception of syntactic (boundary marking) pause in speech-like sequences was studied as a function of duration of intervowel interval with constant and variable local tempo. It appeared that perception of pause depends on lengthening of the intervowel interval which corresponds to consonant or consonant cluster in natural speech and is independent of tempo. The quantitative parameters of a possible model of pause detecting system can be obtained from the experimental data on pause perception.

Temporal information processing in speech perception.

For a set of formal rules for the phonetic interpretation of speech during its perception one should have data concerning a possible structure and parameters of a subjective mechanism for processing temporal information, from segmenting the speech signal to making phonetic decisions. At present such data cannot be found in the literature. An attempt has been made to find out more about some parts of the subjective mechanism of duration measurement and comparison by studying the perception of tempo changes in short sound sequences.