Language-specific patterns of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation: acoustic structures and their perceptual correlates

Abstract

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that V-to-V coarticulatory organization differs in Shona and English, and that Shona- and English-speaking listeners' sensitivity to V-to-V coarticulatory effects is correspondingly language-specific. An acoustic study of Shona and English CV′CVCV trisyllables (Experiment 1) showed that the two languages differ in the carryover vs. anticipatory influences of stressed and unstressed vowels on each other. In 4IAX discrimination tests in which both Shona and English coarticulatory effects were spliced into different coarticulatory contexts (Experiment 2), Shona and English listeners perceptually compensated more (i.e., attributed more of a vowel's acoustic properties to its coarticulatory context in targeted test trials) for effects that were consistent with their linguistic experience. Similarly, when these listeners identified synthetic target vowels embedded into different vowel contexts (Experiment 3), Shona listeners compensated more (i.e., showed larger category boundary shifts) for the vowel contexts that triggered larger acoustic influences in the production study. English listeners' boundary shifts were more complicated but, when these data were combined with those from a follow-up identification study, they showed the perceptual shifts expected on the basis of the English coarticulatory findings. Overall, the relation between the production and perception data suggests that listeners are attuned to native-language coarticulatory patterns.