The influence of language background on the relative perception of vowels.

Abstract

Individual differences in vowel production result in an extensive overlap of vowel categories in F1 × F2 vowel space, especially in languages with large vowel inventories. When perceiving vowel categories, listeners compensate for this variability by identifying vowels relative to the voice characteristics of individual speakers. The present study examines the effect of language background on the relative perception of vowels, i.e., whether listeners engage in vowel normalization differently in languages with vowel inventories of varied sizes and with different amounts of category overlap due to across‐speaker variability. To that end, we compare English and Dutch, both with 10+ vowels and a substantial category overlap, and Spanish, with only 5 vowels and less category overlap. Vowel targets from an /o/–/u/ continuum were embedded in sentences spoken by native speakers of all three languages. F1 of the precursor sentences was modified to be either high or low. Seventy‐two listeners participated in the vo...