Attention to spectral and temporal cues in vowel perception among native speakers of Arabic and English

Abstract

Native speakers of “quantity” languages such as Arabic must learn to attend to duration cues that distinguish certain spectrally similar vowel pairs. It is hypothesized in the present study that native Arabic speakers of English will show an overall greater sensitivity to duration differences between vowels than will speakers of English and they will tend to perceive certain vowel contrasts in their L2 in terms of temporal properties, even when such temporal cues are secondary ones. Results of two perceptual experiments will be discussed. In the first. native English and native Arabic speakers identified a synthetic English beat‐bit continuum consisting of six spectral and six durations steps. In the second, the same subjects were trained to identify synthetic exemplars of two French vowel categories, which differed in both quality and duration. Between‐, and within‐group differences in attention to the two types of cues will be discussed.