Perception of Russian palatalization contrasts by English listeners

Abstract

Russian contrasts palatalized vs. non-palatalized consonants across primary oral articulator, manner, voicing, and word position, in both stressed and unstressed syllables. This palatalization contrast is challenging for native English speakers to master, possibly due to English speakers not being able to discriminate the relevant linguistic contrast in all the environments in which it exists in Russian. Previous studies have shown that English listeners are good at discriminating this Russian contrast pre-vocalically, but there is no experimental evidence indicating how well they discriminate this contrast in the wide variety of environments in which it is used in Russian, and when produced by different talkers. The present study tested how well English listeners could perceive the Russian palatalization contrast across manner, word position, primary oral articulator, and talker. 24 listeners performed an AX discrimination task in which A and X were always produced by two different speakers, one male and...