Abstract
Native speakers perceive illusory vowels when presented with sound sequences that do not respect the phonotactic constraints of their language (Dupoux, Kakehi, Hirose, Pallier, & Mehler, 1999; Kabak & Idsardi, 2007). There is, however, less work on the quality of the illusory vowel. Recently, it has been claimed that the quality of the illusory vowel is also modulated by the phonology of the language, and that the phenomenon of illusory vowels can be understood as a result of the listener reverse inferring the best parse of the underlying representation given their native language phonology and the acoustics of the input stream (Durvasula & Kahng, 2015). The view predicts that listeners are likely to hear different illusory vowels in different phonological contexts. In support of this prediction, we show through two perceptual experiments that Mandarin Chinese speakers (but not American English speakers) perceive different illusory vowels in different phonotactic contexts. Specifically, when presented with phonotactically illegal alveopalatal coda consonants, Mandarin speakers perceived an illusory /i/, but in illegal alveolar stop coda contexts, they perceived a /ə/.
Highlights
The phenomenon of perceptual illusions, that of illusory vowels, has become a very useful probe to understand both loanword patterns and the speech perception mechanism
A visual inspection of the mean percentage of correct responses to the stimuli by both the Mandarin and English speakers (Figure 2) suggests the following: (a) the Mandarin speakers appear to be worse at distinguishing [atɕhima~atɕhma], [atɕhəma~atɕhma], and [athəma~athma]; (b) they appear to be no different from the English speakers with respect to [atɕhəma~atɕhima]; (c) the Mandarin speakers appear to be slightly worse than the English speakers for the pair [athima~athma]; (d) the English speakers appear to be slightly worse than the Mandarin speakers with [athima athəma]
We set out to corroborate a particular view that states that the task of the perceiver during speech perception is to identify the best estimate of the intended underlying representations of the utterance given the acoustic token
Summary
The phenomenon of perceptual illusions, that of illusory vowels, has become a very useful probe to understand both loanword patterns and the speech perception mechanism. It is important to note that, in some of the tokens where the illicit consonantal sequence was created by splicing out the medial vowel (e.g., [abda] from [abida]), they showed that Japanese speakers primarily perceived the spliced out vowel, and not the typical vowel [ɯ] in the same consonantal contexts when the sequence is naturally produced They suggest that remnant co-articulatory traces in the spliced stimuli led to this particular result. This case should be kept separate from cases where there is no coarticulated information due to a spliced out vowel to aid the listener, which was the case in their stimuli that were produced naturally with the consonant sequence violation (for e.g., [abda]) In such items, consistent with the claim of participants perceiving the shortest or ‘minimal’ vowel, the Japanese speakers primarily perceived an illusory [ɯ]
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Schedule a callMore From: Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
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