Coarticulatory influences on the perception of nasal vowel height and the role of language experience.

Abstract

That a listener’s first language affects the perception of a second language is generally undisputed. In addition to linguistic experience, acoustic effects of coarticulation have been shown to influence speech perception [Abramson et al. (1981); Krakow et al. (1988); Mann (1986) and others]. For example, nasalization of vowels has been shown to affect the perception of vowel height due to its spectral consequences in the region associated with vowel height [Beddor and Strange (1982); Krakow et al. (1988); Ohala (1986); Wright (1975)]. While some effects of coarticulation appear to produce the same perceptual shifts crosslinguistically [Mann (1986)], it is not clear that all coarticulatory influences are language independent [Krakow et al. (1988)]. The current study seeks to investigate the relationship between acoustic effects of coarticulation and linguistic experience. Since Portuguese has allophonic and (surface) contrastive nasalization [Wetzels (1997)] and Spanish does not have phonological nasalization in any context [Sole (1992)], adult speakers of these languages were tested, using synthetic stimuli, for perception of contextualized nasal vowels (i.e., nasal vowels adjacent to tautosyllabic nasal consonants) and noncontextualized nasal vowels (i.e., nasal vowels with no adjacent nasal consonant). Results indicate that coarticulatory influences of nasalization are language dependent.