Assessing the perception of foreign speech sounds

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a series of tests in which a set of synthetic /sVt/ stimuli was presented to native speakers of Standard French and Western Canadian English in order to assess the effect of phonemic interference as a perceptual phenomenon. Each linguistic group was asked to categorize the vowel portion of each stimulus in terms of its L1 phonological system, and, in a second test, in terms of its L2 system. In addition, subjects were asked to rate each stimulus as to the adequacy of its vowel as a member of its class. The results provide a representation of the subjects' perceptual categorizations of a subset of the vowel space of their native and their target languages (English /u/ and /U/, and French /u/ and /ü/). Analysis reveals that English /u/ is characterized by significantly higher F2 values than its French counterpart, and that few subjects at the beginner or the intermediate level perceive L2 phonemes in the same way as L2 native speakers; for most, the acoustic specifications of L2 vowels match closely those of their L1 vowels, or are intermediate between the L1 and L2 values, in keeping with the notion of phonetic learning.