Native and non-native phonetic speech perception of American and Finnish listeners

Abstract

Research by Kuhl and colleagues suggests that linguistic experience affects the internal organization of vowel and consonant categories. The present cross-language experiments test the role of language experience on the internal structure of American English and Finnish phonetic categories. Adult native listeners of Finnish and American English were tested with both native and non-native stimulus sets. The synthesized stimulus sets included a contrast that was phonemic in both languages (/r/–/l/) as well as one that was phonemic in only one language (/v/–/w/). Stimuli were modeled after native speakers of the respective language. The stimuli were: a grid of American English /r/–/l/ tokens varying in F2 and F3; a grid of Finnish /r/ tokens varying in aspiration and trill amplitude; a grid of Finnish /l/ tokens varying in F1 transition length and F2; and an American English /v/–/w/ continuum varying in F2. Listeners gave category goodness and identification judgments for individual stimuli based on their native categories, and then rated the similarity of stimulus pairs. Multidimensional scaling analyses were employed to model the internal structure of these categories. The results suggest that internal structure is dependent on language experience. [Work supported by NIH.]