Abstract
Japanese and English use temporal cues within vowels, suggesting an audio-processing advantage for temporally-cued contrasts, while Spanish does not. Using a categorial AXB discrimination task, this study investigated how American English-speaking monolinguals and early and late Spanish-English bilinguals perceive three types of temporally-contrasting Japanese pairs: vowel length (kado/kaado), consonant length (iken/ikken), and syllable number (hjaku/hijaku). All groups performed worse than Japanese controls for the vowel length and syllable number contrasts, but only early bilinguals differed from controls for consonant length. This research contributes to a better understanding of how the first-learned language influences speech perception in a second language.
Highlights
Research on cross-linguistic and non-native (L2) speech perception has documented poorer discrimination and identification of L2 contrasts that are not functional in the native (L1) phonology and established that the relationship between the L1 and L2 phonological inventories is highly predictive of speech perception performance in the L2 (Best, 1995; Flege, 1995, 2003)
Adults have developed highly automatic selective perception routines (SPRs) for detecting reliable acoustic– phonetic cues to differentiate L1 phonemes in variable and prosodic phonetic contexts. Support for this model comes from behavioral studies (e.g., Kewley-Port et al, 2005; training studies of English vowels on Spanish listeners by Kondaurova and Francis, 2010; on Korean listeners by Nishi and Kewley-Port, 2008) showing that L1 speech perception is highly robust under conditions of high cognitive load and nonoptimal listening conditions
The present study extended the findings of Hisagi and Strange (2011) using an online experiment to examine the perception of three types of temporally cued contrasts in Japanese by three groups that differed in their language background history
Summary
Research on cross-linguistic and non-native (L2) speech perception has documented poorer discrimination and identification of L2 contrasts that are not functional in the native (L1) phonology and established that the relationship between the L1 and L2 phonological inventories is highly predictive of speech perception performance in the L2 (Best, 1995; Flege, 1995, 2003). The automatic selective perception (ASP) model (Strange and Shafer, 2008, 2011) was proposed to account for these differences in performance as a function of task, stimuli, and language experience In this model, adults have developed highly automatic selective perception routines (SPRs) for detecting reliable acoustic– phonetic cues to differentiate L1 phonemes in variable and prosodic phonetic contexts. Adults have developed highly automatic selective perception routines (SPRs) for detecting reliable acoustic– phonetic cues to differentiate L1 phonemes in variable and prosodic phonetic contexts Support for this model comes from behavioral studies (e.g., Kewley-Port et al, 2005; training studies of English vowels on Spanish listeners by Kondaurova and Francis, 2010; on Korean listeners by Nishi and Kewley-Port, 2008) showing that L1 speech perception is highly robust under conditions of high cognitive load (increased task difficulty and stimulus complexity) and nonoptimal listening conditions (e.g., background noise). L2 learners show marked decrements in speech perception performance as cognitive load is increased. Strange (2011) hypothesized that non-native listeners need to use focal attention to identify the relevant L2 phonetic cues, even when the stimuli and task are relatively simple
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