Perception and imitation of prevoicing across language backgrounds

Abstract

The present study investigates languages users' ability to perceive and imitate prevoicing, testing speakers of languages differing its contrastive status: (1) those where prevoicing serves as a primary cue to the laryngeal contrast (e.g., Portuguese); (2) those where prevoicing never occurs, with aspiration being the primary cue to the contrast (e.g., Cantonese); and (3) English, where prevoicing occurs in free variation. After hearing pairs of words differing in presence/absence of prevoicing, participants were asked to imitate them, followed by an ABX discrimination task. Preliminary findings show above-chance discrimination accuracy as well as significant imitation of the difference, in participants all language backgrounds, with place of articulation, consonantal, and vocalic cues all affecting the extent of prevoicing in production. As expected, speakers of languages where prevoicing is absent showed less overall prevoicing than other groups; however, there were not clear differences across language groups in the faithfulness of imitation, or in discrimination ability. While faithful imitation was usually associated with accurate discrimination, good discrimination was also found on many tokens that were not faithfully imitated, indicating that factors other than perception are necessary to account for variability in imitative ability.