Abstract
English monolinguals and native Spanish speakers of English rated
the dissimilarity of tokens of two Spanish vowel categories, two
English vowel categories, or one Spanish and one English vowel category.
The dissimilarity ratings of experienced and inexperienced Spanish
subjects did not differ significantly. For both the native Spanish
and English subjects, perceived dissimilarity increased as the distance
between vowels in an F1-F2 acoustic space increased. This supported
the existence of a universal, sensory-based component in cross-language
vowel perception. The native English and Spanish subjects' ratings
were comparable for pairs made up of vowels that were distant in
an F1-F2 space, but not for pairs made up of vowels from categories
that were adjacent in an F1-F2 space. The inference that the differential
classification of a pair of vowels augments perceived dissimilarity
was supported by the results of experiment 2, where subjects rated
pairs of vowels and participated in an oddity discrimination task.
Triads in the oddity task were made up of tokens of vowel categories
that were either adjacent (e.g., /a/-/ae/-/a/) or nonadjacent (e.g.,
/a/-/i/-/i/) in an F1-F2 space. The native English subjects' discrimination
was better than the native Spanish subjects' for adjacent but not
nonadjacent triads. The better the Spanish subjects performed on
adjacent triads--and thus the more likely they were to have differentially
classified the two phonetically distinct vowels in the triad--the
more dissimilar they had earlier judged realizations of those two
categories to be when presented in pairs. Results are discussed in
terms of their implications for second language acquisition.
- acoustics,speech
- discrimination
- english,female,humans,l1,l2,language,male,phonetics,spain,spanish,speech
- learning,language,perception,vowels
- measurement,united
- perception,speech
- production
- states,verbal
- tests,speech
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