On the perception of visual durational speech features: A comparison between native and non native speakers

Abstract

Some languages as Italian and Hindi, are endowed with a set of consonants that are discriminated among them only by the length of the consonant closure (single versus geminate consonants). Consonant closure is a speech temporal feature. This work investigates on visual durational cues to the point they help native and non native speakers in discriminating between single and geminate consonants, in order to ascertain proto multimodal interactive processing mechanisms of time in languages. The comparison is made between a group of Italian subjects, since Italian has geminate consonants, and a group of non natives in order to check if this ability can be attributed to the language expertise. The results show that non natives are able to discriminate between single and geminate consonants even though their performance is not as good as in native speakers, suggesting an innate ability to process visual temporal features in language tasks for supporting the effort to decode the exchanged messages.