AUDITORY PERCEPTION OF SERBIAN AND ENGLISH VOICELESS STOPS BY SERBIAN SPEAKERS AND INTERFERENCE

Abstract

The aim of the paper is twofold: firstly, to examine the relevance of CVformant transitions and bursts in the auditory perception of Serbian word-initial /p t k/ and English[ph th kh] by the speakers of Serbian; and secondly, to explore the relation between native languageexperience of listeners and their perceptual abilities in other languages. The subjects were ten nativespeakers of Serbian (five males and five females) and the corpus consisted of Serbian-Englishpairs of words, illustrating the aforementioned sets of stops before Serbian /í/ (long-rising accent)vs. English /i:/ and Serbian /ȍ/ (short-falling accent) vs. English /ɒ/. Despite the differences in theperceptual salience of the transitions and bursts between the languages in question, the results ofthe research point to the strong tendency of Serbian speakers to rely on the acoustic cues relevantin Serbian (L1) in the auditory perception of English (L2) voiceless stops.