Learning to ignore a perceptual cue: Nonnative listeners outperform native listeners

Abstract

Native and nonnative listeners categorized /v/ and /f/ at the end of English nonwords. For each participant, the duration of the previous vowel was kept constant, so that it was not informative and sometimes mismatched other information in the signal. Vowel duration was varied between participants. Previously presented results [M. Broersma, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 117, 3809–3901 (2005)] showed that native English listeners relied strongly on the misleading vowel duration cue. For Dutch listeners, no effect of vowel duration was found. Due to the redundancy of information in the signal, Dutch listeners categorized the contrast more categorically than English listeners. New analyses investigated whether Dutch listeners did not attempt to use vowel duration at all, or whether they learned to ignore the misleading cue more easily than the English listeners did. The results showed that Dutch listeners did use vowel duration initially, but stopped using this cue after very few trials. By the end of the practice part (33 trials) the effect of vowel duration had fully disappeared. The English listeners used vowel duration as a voicing cue throughout the experiment. This suggests that it may be easier to learn to ignore uninformative perceptual cues in a nonnative language than in one’s native language.