I am a third year bachelor student of Linguistics. It would be nice if I don't get mean comments, because I genuinely do not understand what I am about to ask.
I have to write a paper on phonetic categorisation in perception. Everything that we will write in this paper has to be based on William F. Ganong's (1980) paper "Phonetic Categorization in Auditory Word Perception".
So, what we had to do is run a similar experiment, for a very short time (1 week), and choose a different stimuli and language than that presented in the paper. I chose Slovenian, and my stimuli was on the /b/-/p/ voicing distinction. Therefore, the only thing my stimuli differ in is voicing.
I recorded the stimuli with my own voice.
I was told by my professor that the only thing I need to do to create a /b/-/p/ continuum is change the VOT of those phonemes. So, I thought I did that, but now I am getting really confused about VOT.
Oh btw, we were supposed to modify our phonemes in steps, so that at a certain point a /b/ would sound like a /p/ by changing the "VOT".
But the thing is...Slovenian doesn't even have aspiration, and therefore it doesn't have VOT!!!! So what I was actually modifying my stimuli by cutting away the voicing bit of /b/ and adding it to /p/ in several steps until they created a continuum of /b/ to /p/.
To sum it up: -until now I thought that what I was modifying was VOT
-I have not actually modifying VOT, but cutting out the voicing bits from /b/ and adding it to the /p/ and vice versa.
My questions then are:
-is voicing and VOT the same thing?
-what was I modifying? Is there any study that looks at a simple voicing distinction?
-am I doomed?