Abstract
Speech contrasts which are not functionally distinctive in the mother tongue are difficult to differentiate perceptually for non-native listeners. A two-fold experiment was carried out in order to investigate the L2 perception by 26 Spanish listeners of English, with an English group used as a control. In the present paper, listeners were exposed to the English contrast /s/ vs. /z/, which is not phonemic in Spanish, in two synthesized words, Sue and zoo. The results showed that there were listeners who had already acquired the contrast with some language-specific differences in the use of some of the acoustic cues that signalled this contrast. Furthermore there was no correlation between the results obtained and the variables age of L2 learning, length of L2 learning, or listener’s age. Final conclusions will be drawn from this research and the previous work devoted to place of articulation differences.
Highlights
This paper presents the second part of a two-fold investigation on Spanish perception of non-native contrasts, in particular, how Spanish speakers perceive English contrasts that are not functionally distinct in the mother tongue, or which are phonemic in the native language but differ in their phonetic realisation in the L2
The phoneme boundary was situated at 3.011 (SD 0.870) according to the MLE results. This implied that this group of Spanish listeners perceived a change from the alveolar sibilant to the palato-alveolar one when the acoustic cues manipulated had the following values: (i) the frication duration was approximately 185 ms, (ii) the values of the amplitude of the voice bar was around 38 dB, and (iii) the amplitude of the frication was slightly less than 56 dB
In view of the results, we concluded that the Spanish listeners were almost entirely reliant on the presence of phonation in establishing the voicing contrast and were not making use of the information given by the duration of the fricative noise
Summary
This paper presents the second part of a two-fold investigation on Spanish perception of non-native contrasts, in particular, how Spanish speakers perceive English contrasts that are not functionally distinct in the mother tongue, or which are phonemic in the native language but differ in their phonetic realisation in the L2. The research that is presented here examines voicing distinctions in sibilant fricatives. It focuses on the acoustic cues contained in the signal which can be used by the listeners to identify a phoneme category as well as to apprehend the existence of a phonological contrast (Polka, 1991; Wright, 2001 & 2004; Kabak & Maniwa, 2007; McMurray & Jongman, 2011)
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