Influences of listeners' native and other dialects on cross-language vowel perception.

Daniel Williams,Paola Escudero

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01065

Daniel Williams, Paola Escudero

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01065

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Abstract

This paper examines to what extent acoustic similarity between native and non-native vowels predicts non-native vowel perception and whether this process is influenced by listeners' native and other non-native dialects. Listeners with Northern and Southern British English dialects completed a perceptual assimilation task in which they categorized tokens of 15 Dutch vowels in terms of English vowel categories. While the cross-language acoustic similarity of Dutch vowels to English vowels largely predicted Southern listeners' perceptual assimilation patterns, this was not the case for Northern listeners, whose assimilation patterns resembled those of Southern listeners for all but three Dutch vowels. The cross-language acoustic similarity of Dutch vowels to Northern English vowels was re-examined by incorporating Southern English tokens, which resulted in considerable improvements in the predicting power of cross-language acoustic similarity. This suggests that Northern listeners' assimilation of Dutch vowels to English vowels was influenced by knowledge of both native Northern and non-native Southern English vowel categories. The implications of these findings for theories of non-native speech perception are discussed.

Highlights

Two models on non-native speech perception, Best’s (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Escudero’s (2005, 2009) Second-Language Linguistic Perception Model (L2LP), posit that non-native sounds are perceived by functionally monolingual listeners in terms of native phonological categories
If listeners choose the same vowel category for the modal classification, it can be said that acoustic similarity is a good predictor of perceptual assimilation patterns
Acoustic similarity predicted Sheffield English (SE) listeners’ perceptual assimilation patterns for seven of the nine Dutch monophthongs and only two of the six Dutch diphthongs. It appears that cross-language acoustic similarity is a much better predictor of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) listeners’ perceptual assimilation patterns than those of SE listeners

Summary

Introduction

Two models on non-native speech perception, Best’s (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and Escudero’s (2005, 2009) Second-Language Linguistic Perception Model (L2LP), posit that non-native sounds are perceived by functionally monolingual listeners in terms of native phonological categories. Both models propose that listeners perceptually assimilate or map non-native sounds to native phonological categories to varying degrees, depending on the perceived phonetic similarity to the native sound. The acoustic similarity and perceptual assimilation of Dutch vowels to those in two dialects of British English—a Northern and Southern variety—are compared

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