Abstract
ABSTRACT Cross-linguistic typological observations and theoretical models in phonology suggest that certain speech sound distinctions are more complex then others. One such example is the opposition between mid-high and mid-low vowels, usually thought to be more complex than the opposition between high and mid vowels. The present study provides experimental evidence on speech sound perception which supports this notion. Native Brazilian Portuguese speakers performed vowel classification tasks involving either the distinction between the front high mid /e/ and the front high /i/, or the distinction between the front high mid /e/ and the front low mid /ε/ vowel. Measures of response time and discriminability (d') at the vowel category boundaries were obtained. Participants showed significantly slower responses and lower d' values in the "e-ε" as compared to the "i-e" classification task. Results indicate that perceptually distinguishing /e/ from /ı/ requires more processing time and resources, and involves more complex information than distinguishing /e/ from /i/.
Highlights
A foundational observation in phonology is that the sound systems of languages are systems of oppositions
In the analysis proposed by Nevins (2012), Brazilian Portuguese dialects differ in whether low-mid or high-mid vowels are represented as headed
The boundary estimates and the corresponding formant values – obtained by linear interpolation in the fixed steps of 0.13 (F1) × F2 × F3 Bark space – are shown in Table 1.The boundary values varied across participants between 5.68 and 11.00 for the /i/-/e/ distinction and between 17.24 and 21.63 for the /e/-/ε/
Summary
A foundational observation in phonology is that the sound systems of languages are systems of oppositions. In German, for example, there is an opposition between /h/ and /ʁ/, as shown by minimal pairs such as hose ‘pants’ and rose ‘rose’. No such opposition occurs in Portuguese, as the sounds [h] and [ʁ] are functionally equivalent – using one or the other cannot result in different words/morphemes being perceived by a native listener. Portuguese speakers identify both [‘kahU] and [‘kaʁU] as exemplars of the word carro ‘car’. This example illustrates the fact that speech sounds form functional equivalence classes: sound categories whose elements are treated as functionally equivalent, i.e., having the same value in the language system
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