Phonetic discrimination is affected by native language phonology.

Abstract

English and Japanese speakers were tested on discrimination of phonetic contrasts that vary in their phonemic status according to phonological context. The presence versus absence of /u/ in English stimulus pair ebzo‐ebuzo is nonphonemic in Japanese due to phonological syllable structure constraints, but in word‐initial position (stimulus pair zobe‐uzobe the same contrast is phonemic. Similarly, the contrast between Japanese /d/ versus /r/ is nonphonemic in the foot‐medial position in American English due to an allophonic flapping process, but in word‐initial position the two sounds are perceived as the English phonemic contrast /d/ versus /l/ (Japanese stimulus pairs gudo‐guro and dogu‐rogu. Participants were tested in a four‐token oddball task on all four stimulus sets in a blocked design. Each participant group (Japanese and English) showed significantly poorer discrimination of the non‐native contrast when it appeared in the phonological context in which it is nonphonemic in their native language (p’s < 0.001). This result was equally robust even for stimuli in which the contrastive portion of the stimulus (zo‐uzo, do‐ro) was spliced from the nonphonemic context and pasted into the phonemic context. These data indicate that phonological context plays an integral role in the perception of phonetic signals.