Perception of English final stops by native Spanish and Russian listeners

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Spanish and Russian speakers perception of word-final stops was investigated in an identification task. Natural stimulus triads (sue-suit-sued, see-seat seed) were produced and presented in two conditions: (1) Final consonants released and CV in the utterance final position; (2) final consonants unreleased and CV produced before a word beginning with a voiceless stop. Russian listeners, whose first language has final voiceless stops, correctly identified English final stops better than Spanish listeners, whose first language does not have final stops (72% vs 60% correct overall). Spanish listeners were more likely than Russian listeners to identify words with final stops as open syllables (31% vs 2% errors). A significant effect of release condition was also found: Spanish listeners were much better at identifying released stops than unreleased stops (90% vs 29% correct). Russian listeners also showed a slightly higher correct rate of identification for released stops (91% vs 42%). Both groups identified voiceless final stops more accurately than voiced stops: Russians (80% vs 65% correct); Spanish (65% vs 54% correct). These results replicate and extend earlier work by Flege and colleagues. [Work supported by a grant from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York.]