51610381
The perception and production of British English vowels and consonants by Arabic learners of English
Abstract This study investigated the perception of British English vowels and consonants by native Saudi Arabic learners of English from a range of proficiency levels. Twenty-six participants completed consonant and vowel identification tasks in quiet and noise. To investigate if predicted difficulties with vowel perception were also present in production, participants also recorded vowels embedded in words and read a short story. The results demonstrated that all learners were better able to identify consonants than vowels in quiet and noise, with more experienced learners outperforming early learners. Although learners were likely able to rely on mapping non-native to native categories when identifying consonants, there was some evidence that they had started to establish new vowel targets. This appeared to start early in learning but even highly experienced learners continued to find vowels with no direct Arabic counterpart difficult. Additionally, there was some evidence for a link between perception and production: vowel perception was better in those who had more accurate production. Overall, the results shed light on problematic phonemic contrasts for Arabic learners, and suggest that though learners may be able to establish new phonetic categories early in learning, other contrasts continue to remain difficult even for highly experienced learners.
12045675
Second Language Speech Learning Theory , Findings , and Problems
speech learning changes over the life span and to explain why "earlier is better" as far as learning to pronounce a second language (L2) is concerned. An assumption we make is that the phonetic systems used in the production and perception of vowels and consonants remain adaptive over the life span, and that phonetic systems reorganize in response to sounds encountered in an L2 through the addition of new phonetic categories, or through the modification of old ones. The chapter is organized in the following way. Several general hypotheses concerning the cause of foreign accent in L2 speech production are summarized in the introductory section. In the next section, a model of L2 speech learning that aims to account for age-related changes in L2 pronunciation is presented. The next three sections present summaries of empirical research dealing with the production and perception of L2 vowels, word-initial consonants, and word-final consonants. The final section discusses questions of general theoretical interest, with special attention to a featural (as opposed to a segmental) level of analysis. Although nonsegmental (Le., prosodic) dimensions are an important source of foreign accent, the present chapter focuses on phoneme-sized units of speech. Although many different languages are learned as an L2, the focus is on the acquisition of English.
463529
A perceptual interference account of acquisition difficulties for non-native phonemes
This article presents an account of how early language experience can impede the acquisition of non-native phonemes during adulthood. The hypothesis is that early language experience alters relatively low-level perceptual processing, and that these changes interfere with the formation and adaptability of higher-level linguistic representations. Supporting data are presented from an experiment that tested the perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese, German, and American adults. The underlying perceptual spaces for these phonemes were mapped using multidimensional scaling and compared to native-language categorization judgments. The results demonstrate that Japanese adults are most sensitive to an acoustic cue, F2, that is irrelevant to the English /r/-/l/ categorization. German adults, in contrast, have relatively high sensitivity to more critical acoustic cues. The results show how language-specific perceptual processing can alter the relative salience of within- and between-category acoustic variation, and thereby interfere with second language acquisition.
10216366
English /r/-/l/ category assimilation by Japanese adults: individual differences and the link to identification accuracy.
Native speakers of Japanese often have difficulty identifying English /r/ and /l/, and it has been thought that second-language (L2) learning difficulties like this are caused by how L2 phonemes are assimilated into ones native phonological system. This study took an individual difference approach to examining this relationship by testing the category assimilation of Japanese speakers with a wide range of English /r/-/l/ identification abilities. All Japanese subjects were assessed in terms of (1) their accuracy in identifying English /r/ and /l/, (2) their assimilation of /r/ and /l/ into their Japanese flap category, (3) their production of /r/ and /l/, and (4) their best-exemplar locations for /r/, /l/, and Japanese flap in a five-dimensional set of synthetic stimuli (F1, F2, F3, closure duration, and transition duration). The results demonstrated that Japanese speakers assimilate /l/ into their flap category more strongly than they assimilate /r/. However, there was little evidence that category assimilation was predictive of English /r/-/l/ perception and production. Japanese speakers had three distinct best exemplars for /r/, /l/, and flap, and only their representation of F3 in /r/ and /l/ was predictive of identification ability.
17468902
Perception of Temporal and Spectral Information in French Vowels
Perceptual effects of orthogonal variations in temporal and spectral information differentiating French /o/ and /o/ were examined. Although both parameters contribute to acoustic differentiation of /o/ and /o/, the phonetic and phonological structure of French suggests that duration might be a less important perceptual property in French than in languages like American English. Three 10-step /kot/-/kot/ continua were synthesized by systematically varying frequencies of the first two formants of the vowel nuclei. The three continua differed in vowel duration (140, 180, and 220 msec). Two perceptual tests, identification and 5-choice category rating, were presented to three listener groups: native French, native American English who had studied French, and native American English who did not know French. For both native American English groups, spectrally ambiguous vowels were identified and rated more often as /o/ when these vowels were long and as /o/ when short, thereby showing a trading relation between temporal and spectral information. In contrast, native French listeners showed little effect of duration in either perceptual task. Despite this perceptual insensitivity to duration, acoustic measurements showed that these French subjects' productions of /o/ and /o/ consistently maintained a duration difference. Results are interpreted to support the view that perceptual integration of the acoustic properties relevant to a phonemic contrast depends not only on covariation of the properties in the production of that contrast, but also on the prominence of this covariation in the language's phonological system.
14982891
The influence of L1 on the acquisition of Swedish quantity by native speakers of Spanish, English and Estonian
Abstract This study examined the influence of the L1 phonetic system on the acquisition of Swedish quantity distinctions. The aim was to test the hypothesis that difficulty in acquiring an L2 contrastive category is related to the role in the L1 of the phonetic feature upon which the L2 category is based. Twenty native speakers each of American English, Latin American Spanish and Estonian participated. The phonologies of the subjects' L1 display three degrees of overall prominence of the duration feature. The subjects, who had all lived in Sweden for at least 10 years, were given a production and perception test to assess their mastery of Swedish quantity. The Estonian subjects performed much like Swedish controls. However, some native English, and even more Spanish subjects, differed from native speakers of Swedish. A follow-up experiment compared matched groups of native English and Spanish subjects. It showed that experienced and inexperienced groups of native English and Spanish adults were equally successful in learning to produce and perceive Swedish quantity distinctions, but that the native English subjects more closely matched native Swedish speakers than the native Spanish subjects did. Taken together, our results support the feature hypothesis in that these subjects' success in learning the Swedish quantity contrast seems to be related to the role of the duration feature in the L1.
141507536
Perception of English /i/ and /I/ by Japanese and Spanish Listeners: Longitudinal Results
Flege’s Speech Learning Model predicts that if an L2 learner perceives an L2 speech sound as similar to an L1 speech sound, the two sounds will be combined as a diaphone category, the properties of which will eventually be intermediate between the properties of the L1 and L2 sound. In contrast if the L2 sound is perceived as new, then a new category will be established with properties which may eventually match the properties of the L2 sound. Canadian English has two high front vowels: tense /i/ and lax // differing in spectral and duration properties. Japanese has two high front vowels: long /i/ and short /i/ differing in duration only. English /i/ and // are expected to be perceived as similar to Japanese /i/ and /i/, and Japanese learners of English are predicted to establish diaphone categories. Their identification of English /i/ and // is predicted to initially match their perception of Japanese /i/ and /i/, but eventually be intermediate between the native norms for the L1 and L2 categories. Spanish has one high front vowel. Spanish learners of English are predicted to perceive English // as less similar to Spanish /i/ than English /i/, and are predicted to eventually establish a new // category. Their identification of English /i/ and // is predicted to initially be poor but eventually match that of English listeners. These predictions were tested using a multidimensional edited-speech continuum covering the English words /bt bit bd bid/. Properties which varied in the continuum included vowel spectral properties and vowel duration. A longitudinal study was conducted testing Japanese and Spanish speaking learners of English one month and six months after their arrival in Canada. Japanese listeners were found to have a primarily duration-based categorical boundary between English /i/ and // which did not change between the initial and final tests. Spanish listeners did not have a categorical identification pattern in the initial test, but they did establish duration-based or spectrally-based categorical boundaries by the time of the final test. Results were therefore consistent with the theoretical predictions.
10528545
Learning English vowels with different first-language vowel systems II: Auditory training for native Spanish and German speakers.
This study investigated whether individuals with small and large native-language (L1) vowel inventories learn second-language (L2) vowel systems differently, in order to better understand how L1 categories interfere with new vowel learning. Listener groups whose L1 was Spanish (5 vowels) or German (18 vowels) were given five sessions of high-variability auditory training for English vowels, after having been matched to assess their pre-test English vowel identification accuracy. Listeners were tested before and after training in terms of their identification accuracy for English vowels, the assimilation of these vowels into their L1 vowel categories, and their best exemplars for English (i.e., perceptual vowel space map). The results demonstrated that Germans improved more than Spanish speakers, despite the Germans' more crowded L1 vowel space. A subsequent experiment demonstrated that Spanish listeners were able to improve as much as the German group after an additional ten sessions of training, and that both groups were able to retain this learning. The findings suggest that a larger vowel category inventory may facilitate new learning, and support a hypothesis that auditory training improves identification by making the application of existing categories to L2 phonemes more automatic and efficient.
15723324
Nonnative and second-language speech perception : commonalities and complementarities
Language experience systematically constrains perception of speech contrasts that deviate phonologically and/or phonetically from those of the listener’s native language. These effects are most dramatic in adults, but begin to emerge in infancy and undergo further development through at least early childhood. The central question addressed here is: How do nonnative speech perception findings bear on phonological and phonetic aspects of second language (L2) perceptual learning? A frequent assumption has been that nonnative speech perception can also account for the relative difficulties that late learners have with specific L2 segments and contrasts. However, evaluation of this assumption must take into account the fact that models of nonnative speech perception such as the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) have focused primarily on naïve listeners, whereas models of L2 speech acquisition such as the Speech Learning Model (SLM) have focused on experienced listeners. This chapter probes the assumption that L2 perceptual learning is determined by nonnative speech perception principles, by considering the commonalities and complementarities between inexperienced listeners and those learning an L2, as viewed from PAM and SLM. Among the issues examined are how language learning may affect perception of phonetic vs. phonological information, how monolingual vs. multiple language experience may impact perception, and what these may imply for attunement of speech perception to changes in the listener’s language environment. Commonalities and complementarities 3
62654321
Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties
List of Figures and TablesForeword to the Georgetown Classics editionPreface to the second editionPreface to the first editionTransliteration conventions, gloss lines, and abbreviations Introduction 0.1 Where is Arabic spoken?0.2 Varieties of Arabic0.3 Aims of this bookNotes 1. A Brief History of Arabic 1.1 Arabic as a Semitic language1.2 Arabic at the dawn of Islam1.3 The spread of Arabic1.4 Middle Arabic, the modern dialects, and the evolution of Modern Standard Arabic1.5 The contemporary linguistic situationNotes 2. Phonology 2.1 The phonology of MSA2.2 The phonology of the dialects2.3 Phonological variation in the dialects2.4 Phonology and scriptNotes 3. Verb Morphology 3.1 General principles3.2 Root and morphosemantic patterns: MSA3.3 Morphosyntactic patterns of the finite verb: MSA3.4 Verbal affixes3.5 Morphophonological adjustments3.6 Dialectal verb morphologyNotes 4. Noun Morphology 4.1 The verbal noun4.2 Participles4.3 Other categories of the singular noun4.4 Number4.5 Case and definiteness4.6 Gender Notes 5. Beyond Root and Pattern: Pronouns and Deictics 5.1 Personal pronouns5.2 Demonstratives5.3 Interrogatives5.4 Temporal, locative and manner deicticsNotes 6. Syntax and Semantics I: Phrase Structure 6.1 The noun phrase6.2 The verb phrase6.3 NegationNotes 7. Syntax and Semantics II: Sentence Structure 7.1 Word order7.2 Clause order and typeNotes 8. Lexical and Stylistic Developments 8.1 Foreign borrowing into Arabic8.2 The language academies8.3 The language of the media8.4 Repitition and parallelismNotes 9. Language Level 9.1 Introduction9.2 Language levels in Cairo9.3 Level switching9.4 Co-occurrence phenomena and level9.5 Dialogue and dialect in literature and journalismNotes Appendix: The Arabic Script BibliographyIndex
206465559
Perceptual assimilation of Dutch vowels by Peruvian Spanish listeners.
Many cross-language and L2 speech perception studies have been conducted on English sounds and a limited number of speakers or synthetic tokens have been used for auditory stimuli. The Spanish listeners of the present study were presented with natural tokens of Dutch vowels produced by males and females selected from the corpus reported in Adank et al. [(2004) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 1729-1738]. The results show that single category assimilations are common and that certain Dutch vowels frequently assimilate to Spanish diphthongs. Predictions are made for Spanish learners' initial stage in the acquisition of the Dutch vowel system.
32027051
An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized.
This study examined three ways that perception of non-native phones may be uncategorized relative to native (L1) categories: focalized (predominantly similar to a single L1 category), clustered (similar to > 2 L1 categories), and dispersed (not similar to any L1 categories). In an online study, Egyptian Arabic speakers residing in Egypt categorized and rated all Australian English vowels. Evidence was found to support focalized, clustered, and dispersed uncategorized assimilations. Second-language (L2) category formation for uncategorized assimilations is predicted to depend upon the degree of perceptual overlap between the sets of L1 categories listeners use in assimilating each phone within an L2 contrast.
25117113
On the relationship between identification and discrimination of non-native nasal consonants.
To examine the relationship between the identification and discrimination of non-native sounds, nasal consonants varying in place of articulation from Malayalam, Marathi, and Oriya were presented in two experiments to seven listener groups varying in their native nasal consonant inventory: Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, and American English. The experiments consisted of a categorial AXB discrimination test and a forced-choice identification test with category goodness ratings. The identification test results were used to classify the non-native contrasts as one of five "assimilation types" of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) that are predicted to vary in their relative discriminability: two-category (TC), uncategorizable-categorizable (UC), both uncategorizable (UU), category-goodness (CG), and single-category (SC). The results showed that the mean percent correct discrimination scores of the assimilation types, but not the range of scores, were accurately predicted. Furthermore, differences in category goodness ratings in the CG and SC assimilations that were predicted to correlate with discrimination showed a weak, but significant correlation (r= 0.3 1, p<0.05). The implications of the results for models of cross-language speech perception were discussed, and an alternative model of cross-language speech perception was outlined, in which the discriminability of non-native contrasts is a function of the similarity of non-native sounds to each other in a multidimensional, phonologized perceptual space.
535228
Static and Dynamic cues in vowel production: a cross dialectal study in Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic
Theaimofthispaperistoexaminetheroleof� dynamiccues�(i.e.�formantslopesobtainedfroma� linearregressionanalysis)� incomparisonwith� staticone�(i.e.�voweltargets)�intheclassificati on� ofJordanianandMoroccanvowels,� using� DiscriminantAnalysis.� 10� speakersperdialect� producedalistofvowelsinC 1VC 2,�C1VC 2V,�or� C1VC 2VCwords,�whereC 1�andC 2�wereeither�/ b/,� /d/,�/d�/�or�/ k/,�andV,�eachvowel.�Resultsshowthe� possibilityofvowelseparationbetweenboth� dialectsforaspecificconsonantalenvironment.� Usingdynamiccuesimprovesthecorrect� classificationratesofabout� 5%� forMoroccan� Arabicand�13%�forJordanianArabic.�
60116697
Accents of English
Volume I: An Introduction: Preface Typographical conventions and phonetic symbols Part I. Aspects of Accent: 1. Linguistic and social variability 2. Accent phonology 3. How accents differ 4. Why accents differ Part II. Sets and Systems: 5. The reference accents 6. Standard lexical sets 7. Systems: a typology Part III. Developments and Processes: 8. Residualisms 9. British prestige innovations 10. Some American innovations 11. Some further British innovations Sources and further reading References Index.
46252868
Acoustic variability within and across German, French, and American English vowels: phonetic context effects.
Cross-language perception studies report influences of speech style and consonantal context on perceived similarity and discrimination of non-native vowels by inexperienced and experienced listeners. Detailed acoustic comparisons of distributions of vowels produced by native speakers of North German (NG), Parisian French (PF) and New York English (AE) in citation (di)syllables and in sentences (surrounded by labial and alveolar stops) are reported here. Results of within- and cross-language discriminant analyses reveal striking dissimilarities across languages in the spectral/temporal variation of coarticulated vowels. As expected, vocalic duration was most important in differentiating NG vowels; it did not contribute to PF vowel classification. Spectrally, NG long vowels showed little coarticulatory change, but back/low short vowels were fronted/raised in alveolar context. PF vowels showed greater coarticulatory effects overall; back and front rounded vowels were fronted, low and mid-low vowels were raised in both sentence contexts. AE mid to high back vowels were extremely fronted in alveolar contexts, with little change in mid-low and low long vowels. Cross-language discriminant analyses revealed varying patterns of spectral (dis)similarity across speech styles and consonantal contexts that could, in part, account for AE listeners' perception of German and French front rounded vowels, and "similar" mid-high to mid-low vowels.
205222547
Perception of English consonants in noise by native and Norwegian listeners
The aim of this study was to investigate factors that affect second language speech perception. Listening tests were run in which native and non-native (Norwegian) participants identified English consonants in VCV syllables in quiet and in different noise conditions. An assimilation test investigated the mapping of English consonants onto Norwegian counterparts. Results of the identification test showed a lower non-native performance but there was no evidence that the non-native disadvantage was greater in noise than in quiet. Poorer identification was found for sounds that occur only in English ('novel category' consonants) but this was the case for both English and Norwegian listeners, and thus likely to be related to the acoustic-phonetic properties of consonants in that category. Information transfer analyses revealed a certain impact of phonological factors on L2 perception, as the transmission of the voicing feature was more affected for Norwegian listeners than the transmission of place or manner information. The relation between the results of the identification in noise and assimilation tasks suggests that, at least in higher proficiency L2 learners, assimilation patterns may not be predictive of listeners' ability to hear non-native speech sounds.
15666417
BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN L2 SPEECH PERCEPTION RESEARCH AND PHONOLOGICAL THEORY
A series of experiments shows that Spanish learners of English acquire the ship-sheep contrast in a way specific to their target dialect (Scottish or Southern British English) and that many learners exhibit a perceptual strategy found in neither Spanish nor English. To account for these facts as well as for the findings of earlier research on second language (L2) speech perception, we provide an Optimality Theoretic model of phonological categorization that comes with a formal learning algorithm for its acquisition. Within this model, the dialect-dependent and L2-specific facts provide evidence for the hypotheses of Full Transfer and Full Access.We would like to thank the audiences of the 25th Penn Linguistics Colloquium (Philadelphia, 2001), Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2001 (Palmela), and EuroSLA 11 (Paderborn, 2001) and of talks in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Utrecht, and Munich, all in 2001 as well, for their questions and remarks, and Rachel Hayes, Michael Sharwood Smith, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This research was partially sponsored by grant 355-75-003 to Boersma from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
36038589
The acquisition of Arabic consonants.
This normative study of the acquisition of consonants of Arabic as spoken in Jordan answered 4 questions: (1) What percentage of children at each of 9 age levels produced each consonant correctly? (2) What are the ages of customary production, mastery, and acquisition for each phoneme? (3) Does accuracy of consonants within sound classes vary by position in the word? (4) What are the differences in ages of acquisition between Arabic and English? Samples were collected from 180 normally developing children between the ages of 2:0 and 6:4. The percentages of accuracy of both standard and acceptable consonants were plotted and showed clear developmental trends. Medial consonants were significantly more accurate than initial and final consonants. The ages of customary production, acquisition, and mastery of Arabic consonants were similar to those for English but with notable exceptions that have implications for description of phonological acquisition. Support for previously proposed universal sound acquisition sequences was found, but some language-specific effects were also seen.
22696009
Variation in Voice Onset Time along the Scottish-English Border
This paper presents findings on VOT variability in voiced and voiceless plosives produced by 159 speakers from four locations straddling the English-Scottish border. The analysis reveals key effects of both social and phonetic factors, highlighting the importance of both in accounting for variability.
5523209
The Phonological Basis of Foreign Accent: A Hypothesis.
Foreign accent is often thought to be the result of an age-related diminution in the ability to learn to pronounce languages. Existing studies of L2 pronunciation, however, do not seem to support the claim that there is some fundamental difference between children and adults in phonetic learning ability. The continued presence of foreign accent may instead be a consequence of the establishment of stable phonological representations for sounds and words in the native language. Language learners who perceive sounds in the target language to be phonologically identical to native-language sounds (despite possible phonetic differences between the two languages) may base whatever phonetic learning that does occur during the acquisition process on an acoustic model provided by pairs of similar sounds in two languages, rather than on a single language-specific acoustic model as in first-language acquisition. Thus an adult or child learner of a foreign language may retain the same kind of phonetic learning ability evident in early childhood and yet still speak with an accent because phonological translation provides a two-language source of phonetic input that may ultimately limit progress in learning to pronounce a foreign language.
46179961
Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners.
Native American English and non-native (Dutch) listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.
53477136
Auditory training of English vowels for first-language speakers of Spanish and German
This study compared how first-language Spanish and German speakers learn English vowels via computer-based auditory training. Spanish has fewer vowels than German, and thus Spanish speakers may have more unused room in their vowel space for new category learning. However, our results demonstrated that Germans improved twice as much (20 percentage points) as Spanish speakers (10 percentage points) following 5sessions of training on English vowels (highvariability identification with feedback). The results suggest that the large first-language vowel inventory of German speakers facilitates rather than interfere with new learning.
7456487
High or low? Comparing high and low-variability phonetic training in adult and child second language learners
Background High talker variability (i.e., multiple voices in the input) has been found effective in training nonnative phonetic contrasts in adults. A small number of studies suggest that children also benefit from high-variability phonetic training with some evidence that they show greater learning (more plasticity) than adults given matched input, although results are mixed. However, no study has directly compared the effectiveness of high versus low talker variability in children. Methods Native Greek-speaking eight-year-olds (N = 52), and adults (N = 41) were exposed to the English /i/-/ɪ/ contrast in 10 training sessions through a computerized word-learning game. Pre- and post-training tests examined discrimination of the contrast as well as lexical learning. Participants were randomly assigned to high (four talkers) or low (one talker) variability training conditions. Results Both age groups improved during training, and both improved more while trained with a single talker. Results of a three-interval oddity discrimination test did not show the predicted benefit of high-variability training in either age group. Instead, children showed an effect in the reverse direction—i.e., reliably greater improvements in discrimination following single talker training, even for untrained generalization items, although the result is qualified by (accidental) differences between participant groups at pre-test. Adults showed a numeric advantage for high-variability but were inconsistent with respect to voice and word novelty. In addition, no effect of variability was found for lexical learning. There was no evidence of greater plasticity for phonetic learning in child learners. Discussion This paper adds to the handful of studies demonstrating that, like adults, child learners can improve their discrimination of a phonetic contrast via computerized training. There was no evidence of a benefit of training with multiple talkers, either for discrimination or word learning. The results also do not support the findings of greater plasticity in child learners found in a previous paper (Giannakopoulou, Uther & Ylinen, 2013a). We discuss these results in terms of various differences between training and test tasks used in the current work compared with previous literature.
44412926
Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to the listener's native phonological system.
Classic non-native speech perception findings suggested that adults have difficulty discriminating segmental distinctions that are not employed contrastively in their own language. However, recent reports indicate a gradient of performance across non-native contrasts, ranging from near-chance to near-ceiling. Current theoretical models argue that such variations reflect systematic effects of experience with phonetic properties of native speech. The present research addressed predictions from Best's perceptual assimilation model (PAM), which incorporates both contrastive phonological and noncontrastive phonetic influences from the native language in its predictions about discrimination levels for diverse types of non-native contrasts. We evaluated the PAM hypotheses that discrimination of a non-native contrast should be near-ceiling if perceived as phonologically equivalent to a native contrast, lower though still quite good if perceived as a phonetic distinction between good versus poor exemplars of a single native consonant, and much lower if both non-native segments are phonetically equivalent in goodness of fit to a single native consonant. Two experiments assessed native English speakers' perception of Zulu and Tigrinya contrasts expected to fit those criteria. Findings supported the PAM predictions, and provided evidence for some perceptual differentiation of phonological, phonetic, and nonlinguistic information in perception of non-native speech. Theoretical implications for non-native speech perception are discussed, and suggestions are made for further research.
16095840
Phonology versus phonetics in loanword adaptations: A reassessment of English vowels in French
The question of whether loanword adaptation is based on phonological or phonetic proximity has been widely debated. Focusing on the adaptation of English vowels in French, I argue that on-line adaptations are based on perceived phonetic proximity, which is influenced by co-articulatory information. A perception experiment assessed French listeners’ perception of English vowels presented both within and spliced out of CVC syllables; the results were compared to the on-line adaptations of the same vowels in the same consonantal contexts produced previously by French speakers (Vendelin & Peperkamp 2006). Vowel identification in the two conditions differed, and the on-line adaptations are reflected more closely by the condition with vowels presented in context. These results support the hypothesis that on-line adaptations are based on phonetic, not phonological, proximity. They also show that phonetic variability due to coarticulation influences perception and hence that consonantal context should be controlled for in cross-linguistic vowel comparisons.
17816983
The foreign language cocktail party problem: Energetic and informational masking effects in non-native speech perception.
Studies comparing native and non-native listener performance on speech perception tasks can distinguish the roles of general auditory and language-independent processes from those involving prior knowledge of a given language. Previous experiments have demonstrated a performance disparity between native and non-native listeners on tasks involving sentence processing in noise. However, the effects of energetic and informational masking have not been explicitly distinguished. Here, English and Spanish listener groups identified keywords in English sentences in quiet and masked by either stationary noise or a competing utterance, conditions known to produce predominantly energetic and informational masking, respectively. In the stationary noise conditions, non-native talkers suffered more from increasing levels of noise for two of the three keywords scored. In the competing talker condition, the performance differential also increased with masker level. A computer model of energetic masking in the competing talker condition ruled out the possibility that the native advantage could be explained wholly by energetic masking. Both groups drew equal benefit from differences in mean F0 between target and masker, suggesting that processes which make use of this cue do not engage language-specific knowledge.
41170116
Training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: IV. Some effects of perceptual learning on speech production.
This study investigated the effects of training in/r/-/l/ perceptual identification on /r/-/l/ production by adult Japanese speakers. Subjects were recorded producing English words that contrast /r/ and /l/ before and after participating in an extended period of /r/-/l/ identification training using a high-variability presentation format. All subjects showed significant perceptual learning as a result of the training program, and this perceptual learning generalized to novel items spoken by new talkers. Improvement in the Japanese trainees' /r/-/l/ spoken utterances as a consequence of perceptual training was evaluated using two separate tests with native English listeners. First, a direct comparison of the pretest and post-test tokens showed significant improvement in the perceived rating of /r/ and /l/ productions as a consequence of perceptual learning. Second, the post-test productions were more accurately identified by English listeners than the pretest productions in a two-alternative minimal-pair identification procedure. These results indicate that the knowledge gained during perceptual learning of /r/ and /l/ transferred to the production domain, and thus provides novel information regarding the relationship between speech perception and production.