Effects of linguistic and musical experience on non‐native perception of Thai vowel duration.

Abstract

Previous research has suggested a relationship between musical experience and L2 proficiency. The present study investigated the influence of musical experience on non‐native perception of speaking‐rate varied Thai phonemic vowel length distinctions. Given that musicians are trained to discern temporal distinctions in music, we hypothesized that their musical experience would enhance their ability to perceive non‐native vowel length distinctions as well as their sensitivity to temporal changes as a function of speaking rate. Naive native English listeners of Thai, with and without musical training, as well as native Thai listeners, were presented with minimal pairs of monosyllabic Thai words differing in vowel length at three speaking rates in an identification task and a discrimination task. For identification, participants were asked to identify whether a word contained a long or short vowel. For discrimination, participants heard three successive words and were asked to indicate whether the second word had the same vowel length as the first or last word. The results show significant group differences in identification and discrimination accuracy within and across speaking rates, suggesting that listeners’ perception of phonetic categorical versus temporal acoustic variations differs as a function of linguistic and musical experience.