Examining the success of three kinds of cross-language similarity in predicting English listeners’ discrimination of Danish vowels

Abstract

Several methods have been used in second language speech research to predict nonnative listeners’ discrimination of foreign language speech sounds. The present study examined how well three of these methods predict the discrimination of the four tightly spaced Danish unrounded front vowels by native listeners of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), whose four front vowels are evenly spaced along the close-open dimension. Experiment 1 examined the ecphoric similarity of the Danish and English vowels in a perceptual assimilation task in which L1 SSBE listeners used native labels and goodness-of-fit ratings in identifying the Danish vowels. Experiment 2 examined the perceptual similarity of the English and Danish vowels in a graded discrimination task in which the same listeners rated the degree of dissimilarity of Danish-English vowel pairs. The third prediction of discriminability was derived from an acoustic comparison of the Danish and English vowels in the F1/F2 space. The same participants as in Experiments 1 and 2 then discriminated three Danish front vowel contrasts. None of the three methods was found to fully successfully predict discrimination of the Danish vowels by the SSBE listeners. The presentation will discuss reasons for the lack of predictive power of the three widely used methods.