Perception Of English Consonants Research Articles

Influence of Dialect on the English Consonants Perception by English L2 learners: Evidence from Jiangsu Province for Chinese Native Speakers

The native language will have a negative transfer on the acquisition of second language. Dialects, as a branch of Chinese, also have an influence on English acquisition. The perception of consonants is one of the important foundations of English learning. This study will adopt discrimination as an experimental method to investigate whether there is a significant difference in the influence of different dialects on the perception of English consonants. Three major dialects in Jiangsu province will be taken as a study case to verify the hypothesis that there is a significant difference on the perception of English consonants in different dialects. This study will fill the gap in the overall research on the impact of three major dialects in Jiangsu province on the perception of English consonants, help English language learners with dialect background to reduce the influence of dialects on them and provide some teaching key points to teachers, especially for English language learners in Jiangsu province.

Production and perception of English consonants by Yemeni EFL learners

Many previous studies on the perception-production correlation focused mainly on transcriptions and native English speaker evaluations for production accuracy assessments; only a few included acoustic measurements. The purpose of this study is to examine the production and perception of six English consonants by Yemeni EFL learners of English using an acoustic measurement of L2 production in order to better understand the link between production and perception. It has three objectives: (1) To investigate the extent to which word position influences the accuracy of Yemeni EFL learners’ production of the target consonants, (2) to examine the extent to which word position affects their perception, and (3) to examine the relationship between the overall production and perception of the investigated sounds. A quantitative research method was employed to collect data from six Yemeni EFL postgraduate students from Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). In the production tasks, the speakers were asked to produce seventy-two words with the target consonants three times in isolation (Experiment 1) and the other three times in a carrier sentence (Experiment 2). The researchers recorded the speakers’ productions with an iPhone and later evaluated them acoustically via Praat. In the perception test, an AXB experiment was conducted. The stimuli were read by a native male speaker of Australian English. The findings showed that word position significantly affected the production, yet not the perception of the target sounds. Moreover, an insignificant positive moderate correlation was revealed between the overall production and perception of the target consonants. Results have implications for L2 speech and pronunciation instruction and learning. Teachers may focus more on specific sound environments that lead learners to struggle while producing/perceiving particular English sounds.

The Perception of English Consonants by Arab ELF Learners. A Case Study of University Students at ZU.

The present research focuses on the perception of English consonant sounds by the learners of English at university level. English and Arabic, genetically two different languages, share some common features. They also exhibit a lot of differences. These differences are the main source of difficulty in the learning of English as a foreign language and vice-versa. Some Arabic speakers perform oddly on a range of experimental tasks which involve word discrimination. All these tasks involve discriminating words with identical vowel patterns, but differing in their consonants. Some Arabic learners, it seems, are consciously inaccurate in handling consonants in English words, and much more prone to make errors involving consonants than subjects of other mother tongue background. One possible explanation to these errors is that Arabic speakers seem to transfer to English a set of psycholinguistic strategies that are more appropriately deployed in processing Arabic words. Unlike English, Arabic vowels are of secondary importance both in script and in word building, and the word recognition system depends heavily on the tri-consonantal roots which are the basis of most Arabic words with vowel variations placed within the consonantal framework. From a pedagogical point of view, such differences between the two languages will be determined and included in the various teaching material. In other words, teaching will be directed on these differences. This in turn determines what the teacher has to teach and what the learner has to learn. The present researchers anticipate that the similarities between the two systems would act as a reference point for the learner's perception of the English consonants. The results of the present paper would in turn encourage instructors to follow similar procedures in their teaching of sounds at university level in particular.

Successful non-native speech perception is linked to frequency following response phase consistency

Some people who attempt to learn a second language in adulthood meet with greater success than others. The causes driving these individual differences in second language learning skill continue to be debated. In particular, it remains controversial whether robust auditory perception can provide an advantage for non-native speech perception. Here, we tested English speech perception in native Japanese speakers through the use of frequency following responses, the evoked gamma band response, and behavioral measurements. Participants whose neural responses featured less timing jitter from trial to trial performed better on perception of English consonants than participants with more variable neural timing. Moreover, this neural metric predicted consonant perception to a greater extent than did age of arrival and length of residence in the UK, and neural jitter predicted independent variance in consonant perception after these demographic variables were accounted for. Thus, difficulties with auditory perception may be one source of problems learning second languages in adulthood.

Effect of phonetic training on the perception of English consonants by Greek speakers in quiet and noise conditions

The present study employed high-variability phonetic training (multiple words spoken by multiple talkers) to improve the identification of English consonants by native speakers of Greek. The trainees completed five sessions of identification training with feedback for seven English consonants (contrasting voiced vs. voiceless stops and alveolar vs. postalveolar fricatives) each consisting of 198 trials with a different English speaker in each session. Another group of Greek speakers served as controls, i.e., completed the pre/post test but received no training. Pre/post tests included English consonant identification in quiet and noise. In the noise condition, participants identified consonants in the presence of a competing English speaker at a signal-to-noise ratio of -2dB. The results showed that training significantly improved English consonant perception for the group that received training but not for the control group in both quiet and noise. The results add to the existing evidence that supports the effectiveness of the high-variability approach to second-language segmental training.

Does early foreign language learning in school affect phonemic discrimination in adulthood?

Long-term effects of early foreign language learning with a few hours’ classroom contact per week on speech perception are controversial: some studies show age effects of minimal English input in childhood on phonemic perception in adulthood, but others don’t (e.g., Lin et al., 2004). This study investigated effects of a younger starting age in a situation of minimal exposure on perception of English consonants under noise conditions. The listeners were two groups of Japanese university students: early learners (n = 21) who started studying English in kindergarten or elementary school, and late learners (n = 24) who began to study in junior high school. The selected target phonemes were word-medial approximants (/l, r/). Each nonword (i.e., ala, ara), produced by six native talkers, was combined with speech babble at the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of 8 dB (medium noise) and 0 dB (quite high noise for L2 listeners). A discrimination test was given in the ABX format. Results showed that the late learners discriminated /l/ and /r/ better than the early learners regardless of the noise conditions and talker differences (p < 0.05). A multiple regression analysis revealed that length of learning and English use could contribute to their discrimination ability.

Effects of EPG treatment for English consonant contrasts on L2 perception and production

Links between perception and production were investigated for two adult native speakers of Korean who participated in electropalatographic (EPG) treatment designed to teach phonological and articulatory contrasts between English /s/ - /ʃ/, /z/ - /ʤ/, and /l/ - /ɹ/. Participants were successful in learning to produce the English contrasts. Perception of English consonants was tested pre- and post-treatment. Post-treatment perception improved somewhat for treated consonants but not for untreated consonants, although perception was not directly trained.

B3-1. Lexical familiarity and perception of English consonants by Japanese speakers : A case of /v/ and /b/ (Summaries of Talks at the 25th General Meeting)

B3-1. Lexical familiarity and perception of English consonants by Japanese speakers : A case of /v/ and /b/ (Summaries of Talks at the 25^th General Meeting)

Native and non-native listeners’ perception of English consonants in different types of noise

This paper shows that the effect of different types of noise on recognition of different phonemes by native versus non-native listeners is highly variable, even within classes of phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. In a phoneme identification experiment, English and Dutch listeners heard all 24 English consonants in VCV stimuli in quiet and in three types of noise: competing talker, speech-shaped noise, and modulated speech-shaped noise (all with SNRs of −6 dB). Differential effects of noise type for English and Dutch listeners were found for eight consonants (/p t k g m n ŋ r/) but not for the other 16 consonants. For those eight consonants, effects were again highly variable: each noise type hindered non-native listeners more than native listeners for some of the target sounds, but none of the noise types did so for all of the target sounds, not even for phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. The results imply that the noise types employed will strongly affect the outcomes of any study of native and non-native speech perception in noise.

Perception of English consonants in noise by native and Norwegian listeners

The aim of this study was to investigate factors that affect second language speech perception. Listening tests were run in which native and non-native (Norwegian) participants identified English consonants in VCV syllables in quiet and in different noise conditions. An assimilation test investigated the mapping of English consonants onto Norwegian counterparts. Results of the identification test showed a lower non-native performance but there was no evidence that the non-native disadvantage was greater in noise than in quiet. Poorer identification was found for sounds that occur only in English (‘novel category’ consonants) but this was the case for both English and Norwegian listeners, and thus likely to be related to the acoustic-phonetic properties of consonants in that category. Information transfer analyses revealed a certain impact of phonological factors on L2 perception, as the transmission of the voicing feature was more affected for Norwegian listeners than the transmission of place or manner information. The relation between the results of the identification in noise and assimilation tasks suggests that, at least in higher proficiency L2 learners, assimilation patterns may not be predictive of listeners’ ability to hear non-native speech sounds.

Perception of English consonants in Koreans and Japanese

Perception of English consonants in Koreans and Japanese

Intelligibility of English phonemes in noise for native and non-native listeners

The effect of noise and presentation level on the perception of English consonants by native listeners and non-native listeners were examined. English words contrasting in /r/–/l/, /b/–/v/ and /s/–/th/ sounds, which are known to be difficult to distinguish for native speakers of Japanese, were presented to both native speakers of American English (AE listeners) and those of Japanese (J) in white noise and in pink noise at sytematically changed signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Words were also presented at various presentation levels. The effects of noise and presentation level differed by phonetic contrast and language group. The /b/–/v/ and /s/–/th/ contrasts were more affected by noise at high SNRs, while /r/–/l/ was tolerant for noise when the SNR was higher than −3 dB. The presentation level affected AE listeners’ identification of /b/–/v/, but not of other contrasts. J listeners’ perception was affected less than that of AE listeners, possibly because the flooring effect for J listeners’ identification performance was low, even for original stimuli.

Perception of English consonants from dynamic acoustic properties

Phonetic perception is often said to depend on short-term attributes of vocally produced sound. Counterevidence to this premise is found in the example of sinewave replicas of speech. The dynamic properties of a sinewave replica evoke phonetic impressions despite the absence of typical or natural sounding short-term elements. To gauge the robustness of phonetic perception from dynamic acoustic properties, we compared identification performance by normal listeners across identification tests composed of signals that preserve dynamic properties of speech despite the absence of short-term speechlike properties: sinewave replicas modeled on the natural samples of 18 English consonants in CV syllables, noise-band vocoded signals derived from the natural samples, and chimerical signals exhibiting the coarse-grain spectrum envelope of natural speech and the fine structure of nonspeech signals. Identification from dynamic acoustic properties was well predicted from control performance using sampled natural speech in noise, showing that short-term acoustic properties and their corresponding auditory qualities are inessential in perceiving consonants. This outcome is consistent with a perceptual account that favors attention to the characteristic modulations of an acoustic carrier, and opposes an account appealing to auditory essences of each phonetic element.