Perception of American English /r/ and /l/ by Mandarin speakers: Influences of phonetic identification and category goodness

Abstract

Studies in speech perception show a perceptual magnet effect for listeners which is characterized by shrunken perceptual distances near excellent exemplars of phonetic categories and stretched distances near poor exemplars. This study extended this work by examining the influence of Mandarin speakers’ phonetic identification and category goodness on their perception of American English /r/ and /l/. Eighteen /ra/ and /la/ tokens were used that varied F2 and F3 frequencies. Listeners identified stimuli as Mandarin /u/, /m/, or /l/, provided goodness ratings for them, and rated the similarity of all stimulus pairs. Multidimensional scaling analyses of similarity ratings exhibited that the perceptual ‘‘map’’ for Mandarin speakers differs substantially from that of American speakers [Iverson and Kuhl, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (1996)] listening to the same stimuli. The results indicate that (1) Mandarin speakers perceived /u/ and /l/ in the space, (2) perceptual distance was shrunk near the best exemplars of phonetic categories and stretched near the category boundary, (3) variations of F2 were more important than F3, and (4) individual differences in /l/ identification corresponded to a degree of shrinking near the best exemplars of the /l/ category. Results indicate that listeners use their native-language representations in the perception of a non-native language.