Effects of phonological and phonetic factors on cross-language perception of approximants

Abstract

Past research suggests that the degree of difficulty adults have with discriminating non-native segmental contrasts varies considerably across contrasts and languages. According to a recent proposal, this variation may be explained by differences in how the non-native phones are perceptually assimilated into native phoneme categories [Best, McRoberts & Sithole (1988) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14 , 345-360]. The present study examined that proposal by testing identification and discrimination of three synthetic series of American English approximant contrasts, presented to American English-speaking subjects and native Japanese-speaking learners of English. The English approximants differ with respect to their phonemic status in Japanese, as well as in the phonetic details of the most similar Japanese phonemes. The perceptual assimilation hypotheses were strongly upheld in cross-language comparisons. Moreover, on the assumption that perceptual assimilation may be modified by learning the second language (L2), we also evaluated differences between subgroups of the Japanese subjects who had two different levels of English conversation experience. Those with intensive English conversation experience showed identification and discrimination patterns that were more similar (but not identical) to the Americans’ performance than did those who had had little English experience.