Crosslanguage Study of Vowel Perception

Abstract

This study examines the discrimination and identification of synthetic rounded and unrounded vowels by speakers of two languages (English and Swedish). The unrounded vowels are phonemic in both languages, whereas the rounded vowels are phonemic only in Swedish. A subsidiary aim of the study is to compare the perception of the synthetic vowels with that of synthetic consonant-vowel syllables in which the consonants are stops arranged along a continuum from /b/ to /d/ to /g/. The data indicate that the ability of subjects to discriminate between the vowels is relatively independent of their linguistic experience: Swedish and American English subjects exhibit similar performance in the discrimination tests, though they have somewhat different identification functions. The discrimination functions are characterized by peaks and valleys, suggesting that listeners can discriminate given shifts in the vowel formant frequencies more readily in some vowel regions than in others. Comparison of the data on stop-consonant and vowel perception is consistent with earlier findings: the number of discriminable tokens along the stop-consonant continuum is roughly equal to the number of absolutely identifiable items (three in this case) ; on the other hand, the number of discriminable vowels is much greater than the number that can be absolutely identified. The data are in accord with the view that a human listener uses different modes in the perception of steady-state vowels and stop consonants.

Selective adaptation of vowels

“…1971(Pisoni. , 1973Stevens, Liberman, Studdert-Kennedy, & Ohman, 1969), the withincategory discrimination of vowels is much more susceptible to experimental manipulations which increase the listener's access to his auditory short-term memory for speech stimuli (Pisoni, 1973(Pisoni, , 1975. Consequently, vowels may become more or less categorically discriminated under a range of conditions which do not affect the categorical discrimination of stop consonants.…”

“…In view of the proposed relationships between the adult adaptation data for consonants and the categorical nature of the infant consonant discrimination data, the present set of adult vowel adaptation studies was undertaken in the hope of elucidating the basis for the continuous discrimination observed in the Swoboda et al study of infant vowel discrimination. The vowels along the test continuum ([i-I-E» employed in the present studies may be characterized as sharing the features of "non-low" and "non-back" (Chomsky & Halle, 1968) or of "unrounded" (Stevens, Liberman, Studdert-Kennedy, & Ohman, 1969). Ladefoged (1975) described these vowels as sharing the feature of "front" and var,ying along a continuum from "high-front" ( Table 1.…”

“…Studies of adult vowel perception initially have shown that the vowels [i-I-£] are generally perceived continuously rather than categorically (Fry, Abramson, Eimas, & Liberman, 1962;Pisoni. 1973;Stevens, Liberman, Studdert-Kennedy, & Ohman, 1969 (Trehub, 1973), and most recently that they exhibit continuous discrimination for the vowels [i] vs.…”

A limit on behavioral plasticity in speech perception

“…260): "In the earliest discrimination study, (Fry et al, 1962) found no discrimination peak at category boundary, but this was probably due to a ceiling effect, coupled with the use of imperfectly controlled stimuli. Most later studies (e.g., Fujisaki and Kawashima, 1969;Fujisaki and Kawashima, 1970;Pisoni, 1971;Stevens et al, 1969) have found clear peaks on vowel continua, so there is good reason to believe that there is a phonetic component in vowel discrimination". is typically more difficult in the vicinity of a prototype (Kuhl, 1994).…”

Precategorical acoustic storage for vowels of short and long duration

“…I appreciate the comments of Doris Aaronson and Ruth Day on an earlier version of this paper. amount of evidence from research conducted at Haskins Laboratories (see, for example, Stevens, Liberman, Studdert-Kennedy, & Ohman, 1969) has established important differences between the perception of vowels and stop consonants in the ABX situatkm, where the S hears three separated sounds and must judge whether the third is identical to the first or to the second. With stop consonants synthesized to vary regularly along an acoustic continuum from, say, Ibal to Idal in equal steps, one can predict accuracy in ABX discrimination by knowing which phonetic label or name, "b " or "d," the S is likely to have assigned the stimuli when he first heard them.…”