Abstract
A group of Spanish- and English-speaking listeners participated in
a multidimensional scaling (MDS) study examining perceptual responses
to three Spanish and seven English vowels. The vowel stimuli represented
tokens of Spanish /i/, /e/, and /a/ and English /i/, /I/, /eI/, /epsilon/,
/ae/, /lambda/, and /a/. Each vowel had been spoken by three monolingual
talkers of Spanish or English and all possible vowel pairs (405 pairs)
were presented to listeners (excluding pairs representing the same
vowel category). Thirty monolingual English listeners and thirty
native Spanish listeners who had learned English as a second language
rated these vowel pairs on a nine-point dissimilarity scale. These
perceptual distances were then analyzed using then individual-differences
version of ALSCAL. Results demonstrated that the English monolinguals
used three underlying dimensions in rating vowels while the Spanish-English
bilinguals used just two. The most salient perceptual dimension for
both groups distinguished vowel height. However, for the English
listeners, this dimension was most significantly correlated with
duration and indicated a language-dependent sensitivity to this phonetic
feature. The second dimension for the English listeners represented
a front-back distinction, while the third reflected a central/noncentral
distinction. For the Spanish listeners, the second dimension was
less easily interpreted. However, the perceptual data for the Spanish
listeners was more interpretable in terms of the distribution of
the vowels in the two-dimensional perceptual plane. The vowels were
distributed in terms of three separate vowel clusters, each cluster
near the location of a Spanish vowel.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
- acoustics,speech
- adult,english,female,humans,l1,l2,male,phonetics,pilot
- discrimination
- perception,united
- projects,spain,spanish,speech
- states,language,vowels
- tests,speech
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