Consonantal context and experience effects on American L2-learners’ perception of French vowels

Abstract

According to Best’s [Best, C. T. (1994). ‘‘The emergence of native-language phonological influence in infants: A perceptual assimilation model,’’ in The Development of Speech Perception: The Transition from Speech Sounds to Spoken Words, edited by J. Goodman & H. C. Nusbaum (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA); Best, C. T. (1995) ‘‘A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception,’’ in Speech Perception and Linquistic Experience Issues in Cross-Language Research, edited by W. Strange (York Press, Baltimore, MD)] Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), listeners’ perceptual assimilation of unfamiliar speech sounds predicts their discrimination accuracy of these sounds. This study applied the PAM to second-language (L2) learners. Three groups of American English (AE) listeners performed a perceptual assimilation (PA) task involving Parisian French (PF) vowels /y-œ -u-o-i-ε-a/ and a categorial discrimination task involving French front versus back rounded pairs /y-u/, /y-o/, /œ -o/, /œ -u/, front rounded versus front unrounded /y-i/, /y-ε/, /œ -ε/, /œ -i/, and front rounded /y-œ /. Vowels were in bilabial /rabVp/ and alveolar /radVt/ contexts. PF front-rounded vowels were perceptually assimilated overwhelmingly to back AE vowels, resulting in more discrimination errors for front-versus back-rounded PF pairs than for front-unrounded versus rounded pairs. Listeners with formal French instruction fared similarly to listeners with no experience. Extensive immersion correlated with fewer errors than formal experience, although /u-y/ discrimination remained relatively poor for this group. More errors occurred in alveolar than bilabial context. Thus, native-language allophonic variation may explain context-specific L2 perception. Using a percent overlap method, a significant correlation was found between PA overlap and discrimination errors for all groups, suggesting that the PAM may be extended to L2-vowel learning. [Work supported by NIH.]