Abstract

Anecdotal evidence suggests that unfamiliar languages sound faster than one’s native language. Empirical evidence for this impression has, so far, come from explicit rate judgments. The aim of the present study was to test whether such perceived rate differences between native and foreign languages (FLs) have effects on implicit speech processing. Our measure of implicit rate perception was “normalization for speech rate”: an ambiguous vowel between short /a/ and long /a:/ is interpreted as /a:/ following a fast but as /a/ following a slow carrier sentence. That is, listeners did not judge speech rate itself; instead, they categorized ambiguous vowels whose perception was implicitly affected by the rate of the context. We asked whether a bias towards long /a:/ might be observed when the context is not actually faster but simply spoken in a FL. A fully symmetrical experimental design was used: Dutch and German participants listened to rate matched (fast and slow) sentences in both languages spoken by the same bilingual speaker. Sentences were followed by non-words that contained vowels from an /a-a:/ duration continuum. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed a consistent effect of rate normalization for both listener groups. Moreover, for German listeners, across the two experiments, foreign sentences triggered more /a:/ responses than (rate matched) native sentences, suggesting that foreign sentences were indeed perceived as faster. Moreover, this FL effect was modulated by participants’ ability to understand the FL: those participants that scored higher on a FL translation task showed less of a FL effect. However, opposite effects were found for the Dutch listeners. For them, their native rather than the FL induced more /a:/ responses. Nevertheless, this reversed effect could be reduced when additional spectral properties of the context were controlled for. Experiment 3, using explicit rate judgments, replicated the effect for German but not Dutch listeners. We therefore conclude that the subjective impression that FLs sound fast may have an effect on implicit speech processing, with implications for how language learners perceive spoken segments in a FL.

Highlights

  • It is a common impression that foreign languages (FLs) seem to be spoken faster than one’s own native language

  • German listeners reported a higher percentage of long vowel (/a:/) responses when the target vowel followed a FL carrier sentence compared to a L1 carrier sentence

  • This suggests that when the German participants listened to Dutch, they perceived the carrier sentence as relatively fast, biasing their perception of subsequent ambiguous vowels towards the long vowel /a:/; similar to how fast speech biases perception towards /a:/

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Summary

Introduction

It is a common impression that foreign languages (FLs) seem to be spoken faster than one’s own native language This subjective impression manifests itself, for instance, in remarks of many language learners, frequently asking their interlocutors if they can please slow down. 338) and has attracted the attention of speech scientists for many decades (cf Osser and Peng, 1964) Empirical evidence for this FL effect (as it will be referred to throughout this paper) in speech rate perception has been provided with tasks in which listeners had to judge or sort the speech rate of sentences in different languages. The authors found a negative correlation between this FL effect and FL comprehension scores: the better the learners were able to understand the content of the stories, the smaller the FL effect (i.e., the smaller the difference in rate judgments to the native listeners)

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