Russian Listeners Research Articles

Cross-language perception of Russian plain∕palatalized laterals and rhotics.

A number of studies investigating factors in non‐native speech perception have focused on discrimination and identification of English /l/ and /r/ by listeners whose native languages do not have the relevant phonemic contrast. Relatively little work, however, has been done on non‐native perception of lateral/rhotic contrasts in other languages and particularly on the perception of palatalized laterals or rhotics. This paper presents results of an AX discrimination experiment where 84 listeners, native speakers of Cantonese, English, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Russian, were presented with stimuli containing intervocalic consonants /l/, /lj/, /r/, and /rj/ produced by a Russian native speaker. The results revealed significant differences in the perception of the lateral/rhotic contrasts across the listener groups, with relatively good discrimination of the contrasts by Korean and English listeners (yet less accurate compared to Russian listeners), and much poorer discrimination by the other groups of n...

The relationship between native allophonic experience with vowel duration and perception of the English tense/lax vowel contrast by Spanish and Russian listeners

Two studies explored the role of native language use of an acoustic cue, vowel duration, in both native and non-native contexts in order to test the hypothesis that non-native listeners' reliance on vowel duration instead of vowel quality to distinguish the English tense/lax vowel contrast could be explained by the role of duration as a cue in native phonological contrasts. In the first experiment, native Russian, Spanish, and American English listeners identified stimuli from a beat/bit continuum varying in nine perceptually equal spectral and duration steps. English listeners relied predominantly on spectrum, but showed some reliance on duration. Russian and Spanish speakers relied entirely on duration. In the second experiment, three tests examined listeners' use of vowel duration in native contrasts. Duration was equally important for the perception of lexical stress for all three groups. However, English listeners relied more on duration as a cue to postvocalic consonant voicing than did native Spanish or Russian listeners, and Spanish listeners relied on duration more than did Russian listeners. Results suggest that, although allophonic experience may contribute to cross-language perceptual patterns, other factors such as the application of statistical learning mechanisms and the influence of language-independent psychoacoustic proclivities cannot be ruled out.

Cross-linguistic Differences in the Perception of Palatalization

This paper investigates the difference between basic psycho-acoustic auditory perception and language-specific perception of speech sounds. This was examined in two experiments with American English and Russian listeners. Results suggest that listeners' language does not influence auditory perception, but does affect the rated perceptual similarity of speech sounds.

Perception of the English tense/lax vowel contrast by native speakers of Russian

The present study examined the effect of native language background on the perception of American English tense and lax front unrounded vowels ([i] and [I]). These vowels are distinguishable according to both spectral (vowel quality) and temporal (vowel duration) properties. Nineteen native Russian and 12 native American English listeners identified stimuli from a two-dimensional beat-bit continuum varying in 10 spectral and nine duration steps. English listeners used predominantly spectral quality when identifying these vowels, but also showed some reliance on duration cues. In contrast, Russian listeners failed to employ vowel quality to differentiate English tense and lax vowels which can be explained by their assimilation to the same Russian /i/ phoneme in a ‘‘single category assimilation’’ process (Best, 1995). Instead, they relied almost entirely on the duration cue, despite the absence of distinctive vowel length in Russian. These results could be interpreted as supporting the desensitization hypothesis (Bohn, 1995): When spectral differences are insufficient to distinguish a non-native vowel contrast, duration will be employed by default. Alternatively, the strength of Russian listeners’ reliance on duration may instead reflect the influence of prior experience with subphonemic duration contrasts within the lexical stress system of the Russian language.

Perception of English final stops by native Spanish and Russian listeners

Spanish and Russian speakers perception of word-final stops was investigated in an identification task. Natural stimulus triads (sue-suit-sued, see-seat seed) were produced and presented in two conditions: (1) Final consonants released and CV in the utterance final position; (2) final consonants unreleased and CV produced before a word beginning with a voiceless stop. Russian listeners, whose first language has final voiceless stops, correctly identified English final stops better than Spanish listeners, whose first language does not have final stops (72% vs 60% correct overall). Spanish listeners were more likely than Russian listeners to identify words with final stops as open syllables (31% vs 2% errors). A significant effect of release condition was also found: Spanish listeners were much better at identifying released stops than unreleased stops (90% vs 29% correct). Russian listeners also showed a slightly higher correct rate of identification for released stops (91% vs 42%). Both groups identified voiceless final stops more accurately than voiced stops: Russians (80% vs 65% correct); Spanish (65% vs 54% correct). These results replicate and extend earlier work by Flege and colleagues. [Work supported by a grant from the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York.]

Processing of grammatical gender in a three-gender system: experimental evidence from Russian.

Four experiments investigated the effect of grammatical gender on lexical access in Russian. Adjective-noun pairs were presented auditorily, using a cued-shadowing technique in which subjects must repeat the second word (the target noun), following adjectives that are either concordant or discordant with the noun's gender. Experiment 1 demonstrates gender priming with unambiguous adjectives and phonologically transparent masculine or feminine nouns. Experiment 2 examines priming for transparent nouns against a neutral baseline (possible only for feminines and neuters), revealing that priming is due primarily to inhibition from discordant gender. Experiment 3 demonstrates gender priming with phonologically opaque masculine and feminine nouns. Experiment 4 returns to transparent masculine and feminine nouns with a different kind of baseline, using three versions of a single word root (prost--simple, in the feminine adjectival form prostaja, masculine adjectival form prostoj, and the adverbial form prosto), and shows that gender can also facilitate lexical access, at least for feminine nouns. We conclude that Russian listeners can exploit gender agreement cues "on-line," helping them to predict the identity of an upcoming word.