Segmental phonetic cues to language identity.

Abstract

In experiment 1, detailed acoustic analyses of 42 tokens of taco as spoken either in Spanish or English by monolinguals, and in both languages by early and late learners of English L2, were performed. As expected, the early learners’ renditions of taco in Spanish and English differed more than the later learners’. Correlation techniques revealed that the extent to which the bilingual talkers approximated English phonetic norms for the four segments in taco was interrelated, suggesting that the word is an important unit in cross-language phonetic interference. In experiment 2, three expert listeners identified the language in which the taco tokens had been spoken, then rated each for goodness. The Spanish and English monolinguals’ renditions of taco were readily differentiated, indicating that purely phonetic differences can cue language identity. The late learners’ English and Spanish renditions were judged to be only slightly different whereas the listeners tended to judge the early learners’ renditions as being clearly Englishlike or Spanishlike. Multiple regression analyses examining the acoustic variables from experiment 1 were able to account for most variance in the listeners’ identification judgments and goodness ratings (81%, 97%). In experiment 3, three acoustic parameters identified as significant predictors of the listeners’ perceptual judgments (viz., VOT of ‘‘t,’’ the spectral quality of ‘‘a,’’ and ‘‘o’’ duration) were varied from ‘‘Spanish’’ to ‘‘neutral’’ to ‘‘English’’ in synthetic versions of taco. All other parameters were set to the average of values observed for the Spanish and English monolinguals. The hypothesis was tested that language identification may be based on a single segment, whereas goodness ratings are based on properties distributed through the entire word.