Abstract
Theories of speech perception differ as to whether experience with sounds or with sound contrasts is more important when discriminating novel sounds. To explore this question, 21 American English, 16 Turkish, and 16 French speakers were tested on their ability to discriminate high front vowels in German (/i/∼/y/∼/Y/∼/I/). The crucial difference between the participant languages is that English only uses the tense‐lax contrast (/i/∼/I/), while Turkish and French only use the rounding contrast (/i/∼/y/). If contrast is crucial, then English speakers should be better at discriminating /y/∼/Y/, whereas if the inventory is crucial, then they should be better at discriminating /I/∼/Y/. The results of a fixed discrimination task show that there is no significant effect of language and that the tense‐lax contrast (/i/∼/I/; /y/∼/Y/) is universally more easily discriminated than the rounding contrast (/i/∼/y/; /I/∼/Y/). The results of a rating task do reflect an influence of language, however with English‐listeners...
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