Do language-specific differences in primary acoustic cues affect relative weighting of secondary cues to phonological contrasts?

Abstract

Cross-language differences in cue weighting are often attributed to differences in phonological inventories, in that listeners are assumed to give greater weight to those acoustic cues that best differentiate the specific phonological categories of their native language. However, subphonological properties of a given contrast may also affect weighting of acoustic cues for acoustic or perceptual reasons, in a manner independent of the structure of the listeners’ phonological inventory. Here, this possibility is investigated by comparing Spanish and English listeners’ relative weighting of two acoustic cues to the syllable-initial stop consonant voicing contrast /b/-/p/: Voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency at the onset of voicing (onset f0). Spanish and English possess comparable word-initial stop consonant inventories, but differ in the phonetic realization of the voicing contrast in terms of VOT: Spanish contrasts a short lag (<10 ms) /p/ with a prevoiced (<0 ms) /b/, while English contrasts a long lag (> 50 ms) /p/ with a short lag (<20 ms) /b/. Preliminary results (N = 7) suggest that, although speakers from both languages depend mainly on VOT, Spanish speakers give more weight to onset f0 when VOT is ambiguous than do English listeners.