An Effect of Sentence Finality on the Phonetic Significance of Silence

The presence or absence of silence was found to be a relevant cue for the distinction between affricate /t∫/ and fricative /∫/ when it occurred in sentence-medial position, but not when it occurred at a sentence boundary. This was so in all cases in which target words and their precursors were both produced by the same talker and in some cases in which they were produced by different talkers. The effect was not dependent on specific durations of the silent interval, nor upon listeners' perceptions of the number of talkers who had produced the utterances. These results are, along with previous findings, taken to be consistent with the principle that silence can have phonetic significance for a listener only when it is perceived to have occurred in a stretch of speech that was articulated continuously.