Perceptual discrimination measure of non-native phoneme perception in early and late Spanish-English and Japanese-English bilinguals

Abstract

This study examined speech discrimination of English vowels /ɑ/ (as in “hot”), /ʌ/ (as in “hut”), and /æ/ (as in “hat”) by non-native English speakers, using an AXB discrimination task. Previous research shows that a person’s first language (L1) changes how speech is perceived in a second learned language (L2). Spanish and Japanese were chosen for this study because both languages share the same five spectrally different vowels, but Japanese additionally distinguishes between short and long versions of those five vowels. L2 proficiency and/or amount of L2 input were used as additional predictor variables. The target populations were early and late Spanish-English bilinguals and early and late Japanese-English bilinguals, which were compared to a control group of monolingual American English speakers. We are currently collecting data and based on previous studies (Shafer et al., under review), we predict: (1) monolinguals and early-bilinguals will show better performance than late-bilinguals; (2) discrimination of /ʌ/ vs. /æ/ contrast will be easier than other contrasts, /ʌ/ vs. /ɑ/ and /ɑ/ vs. /æ/. Our findings will address how L1 spectral-temporal cues and L2 age of acquisition affect L2 speech perception.