Abstract
This paper investigates the relationship between speech perception and linguistic experience in Kaqchikel, a Guatemalan Mayan language. Our empirical focus is the perception of plain, ejective, and implosive stops. Drawing on an AX discrimination task, a corpus of spoken Kaqchikel, and a text corpus, we make two claims. First, we argue that speech perception is mediated by phonemic representations which include acoustic detail drawn from prior phonetic experience, as in Exemplar Theory. Second, segmental distributions also condition speech perception: The perceptual distinctiveness of a pair of phonemes is affected by their functional load and relative contextual predictability. These top-down factors influence phoneme discrimination even at relatively fast response times. We take this result as evidence that distributional factors like functional load may affect speech perception by shaping perceptual tuning during linguistic development. This study replicates and extends some key findings in speech perception in the context of a language (Kaqchikel) which is structurally and sociolinguistically different from the majority languages (like English) which have served as the basis of most work in the speech perception literature. At the practical level, our research illustrates methods for conducting corpus-based laboratory phonology with lesser-studied and under-resourced languages.
Highlights
Bennett et al: Statistical and acoustic effects on the perception of stop consonants in Kaqchikel (Mayan)
Apart from general concerns about whether results obtained with such populations are really generalizable (e.g., Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), the bias in speech perception studies toward literate speakers of Indo-European languages is potentially relevant for understanding how phoneme-level lexical statistics interact with speech perception
We have demonstrated experimentally that prior linguistic experience affects speech perception, not because different languages have different phonemic inventories (e.g., Werker & Logan, 1985; Werker & Tees, 1984a), and because languages differ in the fine phonetic details associated with phonemic categories, as well as in their lexical structure and patterns of usage
Summary
Bennett et al: Statistical and acoustic effects on the perception of stop consonants in Kaqchikel (Mayan). More recent research has suggested that the statistical structure of the lexicon may influence native language speech perception (e.g., Hall & Hume, in preparation; see Hall, Hume, Jaeger, & Wedel, in preparation; Hall, Letawsky, Turner, Allen, & McMullin, 2014; Kataoka & Johnson, 2007; Vitevitch & Luce, 2016 and references there; Yao, 2011, Ch. for related discussion). It seems clear that statistical properties of a hearer’s native language may influence speech perception. Art. 9, page 3 of 42 such effects to phonemic awareness, itself an artifact of literacy in an alphabetic writing system Against this backdrop, further studies of speech perception among populations with non-alphabetic writing systems, or low literacy rates, are clearly needed. It is not our place here to adjudicate between these views, only to highlight the fact that answering such questions will require a more diverse sample of speakers and languages than currently exists in the speech perception literature
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