Phonotactics and phonetic context in the perception of onset nasality in Taiwanese

Sheng-Fu Wang

doi:10.3765/amp.v5i0.4231

Abstract

This paper reports an experiment on Taiwanese speakers' perception of the distinction between voiced oral and nasal onsets. This distinction is not phonemic in Taiwanese, a language with phonemic nasal vowels: voiced oral onsets only precede oral vowels, and the nasal onsets only precede nasal vowels. The experiment aimed to answer two research questions. First, when the distinction occurs before a nasal vowel, does perception improve when the oral onset is cued by an initial oral portion of the nasal vowel? Second, are all attested contrasts of oral and nasal syllables (e.g., [ba] vs. [mã], [la] vs. [nã]) perceived equally well, or are there effects of places and manners of articulation? The results of an ABX experiment showed that the adding an oral portion to a nasal vowel did not improve Taiwanese speakers’ perception of the unattested distinction of oral voiced and nasal onsets. Within the attested contrasts between oral and nasal syllables, the results showed that contrasts with more salient cues (e.g., aspirated stops vs. nasals) yielded better performances. Overall, this experiment shows that both phonotactics and phonetic cues play a role in the perception of nasality distinction in voiced onsets.

Highlights

This paper reports an experiment that was designed to test the role of phonotactics and phonetics in Taiwanese speakers’ perception of nasal contrast in voiced onsets
For the attested contrast between voiced oral onset with an oral vowel versus nasal onset with a nasal vowel (e.g., [la] vs. [na]), all but two subjects performed below 90%
The results suggest a mix of phonotactic effects and phonetic effects

Summary

Introduction

This paper reports an experiment that was designed to test the role of phonotactics and phonetics in Taiwanese speakers’ perception of nasal contrast in voiced onsets. The empirical domain is the CV phonotactics in Taiwanese. In Taiwanese, a voiced onset and a vowel have to agree in nasality. There is no surface contrast between voiced stops (b, l, g) and nasal stops (m, n, N). The same restriction does not occur in French and Portuguese, both of which have phonemic nasal vowels just like. The patterns in Taiwanese and French/Portuguese are schematized in (1) and (2)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion