An effect of phoneme frequency on stop place perception by English-speaking and Japanese-speaking listeners.

Abstract

The effects of phoneme frequency on stop place perception were examined. In English, [t] is more frequently observed than [k] while the opposite is true in Japanese. If the sound frequency affects the phoneme perception, English listeners would identify more of the ambiguous [t]-[k] stimuli as “t” than do Japanese listeners. In this study, a 4IAX discrimination experiment and a phoneme boundary decision experiment were conducted with English-speaking and Japanese-speaking listeners to test this hypothesis. The stimuli of the two experiments were created by the Klatt synthesizer. [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were recorded by a native Japanese speaker and a native English speaker, respectively. Then, [ta], [ka], [to], and [ko] were synthesized based on the parameter values obtained from the measurements of the recorded tokens. They were used as the end-point tokens of a nine-step continuum. The rest of the tokens were created by manipulating frequency parameters of the synthesizer. Four sets of [k]-[t] continua were created (two languages: English and Japanese, and two vowel conditions: [a] and [o]). A preliminary analysis of a subset of data demonstrated that the more frequent sound in each language occupied a larger perceptual region of the [a] vowel continua.