Cross‐linguistic perception of velar and alveolar obstruents: A perceptual and psychoacoustic study.

Abstract

It is well‐known that velar stop consonants coarticulate more with the following vowel than stops at other places of articulation. The fine phonetic detail of this coarticulation is highly language‐specific. For example, /k/ in Greek is more front before front vowels and more back before back vowels relative to /k/ in English [Arbisi‐Kelm et al. (2008)]. The purpose of this study was to investigate how these cross‐linguistic differences in production influence perception of place of articulation for lingual stops. The stimuli were word‐initial consonant‐vowel (CV) sequences excised from words produced by 2‐ to 5‐year‐old children and adults. The listeners were 20 adult native English speakers (tested in Minneapolis, USA) and Greek speakers (tested in Thessaloniki, Greece) who listened to these sequences combined across ages and languages in a visual analog scaling task [Urberg‐Carlson et al. (2008)]. Listeners rated how alveolar or velar each sequence was by clicking on a double‐headed arrow anchored with language‐specific orthographic representations of the target consonants. Results showed that the two groups of adults perceived the sounds differently, as would be expected. We will report on the relationship between listeners’ perception and psychoacoustic properties of the stop bursts. [Work supported by NIDCD 02932 and NSF BCS072914 and BCS0729277.]