Effect of word familiarity on non-native phoneme perception: identification of English /r/, /l/ and /w/ by native speakers of Japanese

Yamada, Reiko; Tohkura, Yoh’ichi; Kobayashi, Noriko

doi:10.1515/9783110882933.103

Cited by 27 publications

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“…There are many examples of language-specific speech perception patterns in the research literature. For instance, Japanese listeners, whose language has only one liquid sound, perceive the English /ɹ-l/ distinction differently from American English (AE) speakers [Goto, 1971;Miyawaki et al, 1975;MacKain et al, 1981;Strange and Ditman, 1984;Logan et al, 1991;Yamada et al, 1992;Lively et al, 1993Lively et al, , 1994Flege et al, 1996]. Similarly, Werker and Tees [1984] found that Hindi speakers are more sensitive than English speakers to a contrast between voiceless unaspirated retroflex stops and dental stops ([ʈa] [ʃ] to speakers of American English and that Americans had reduced perceptual sensitivity to the contrast even in very low-level discrimination tasks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners

Huang

Johnson

2011

Phonetica

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The results reported in this paper indicate that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese rate the perceptual similarities among the lexical tones of Mandarin differently than do native speakers of American English. Mandarin listeners were sensitive to tone contour while English listeners attended to pitch levels. Chinese listeners also rated tones that are neutralized by phonological tone sandhi rules in Mandarin as more similar to each other than did English speakers – indicating a role of phonology in determining perceptual salience. In two further experiments, we found that some of these differences were eliminated when the listening task focused listeners’ attention on the auditory properties of the stimuli, but, interestingly, a degree of language specificity remained even in the most purely psychophysical listening tasks with speech stimuli.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners

Huang

Johnson

2011

Phonetica

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“…Problems occur in both perception and production of such sounds, and may persist even after years of immersion in the non-native language environment ͑Best and Strange, 1992;Flege and Eefting, 1987;MacKain et al, 1981;Yamada, 1995;Yamada et al, 1994͒. Many factors can affect how a speaker of one language perceives the speech sounds of another language and not all non-native contrasts are equally difficult to perceive or produce ͑Best et al., 1988;Tees and Werker, 1984͒. Large differences have been found in non-native perception that result from such factors as native language experience, cognitive abilities, motivation of the listeners, the task used to measure perceptual ability, and many variables concerning the stimuli to be perceived ͑Strange, 1992͒.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Training the perception of Hindi dental and retroflex stops by native speakers of American English and Japanese

Pruitt

Jenkins

Strange

2006

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Perception of second language speech sounds is influenced by one's first language. For example, speakers of American English have difficulty perceiving dental versus retroflex stop consonants in Hindi although English has both dental and retroflex allophones of alveolar stops. Japanese, unlike English, has a contrast similar to Hindi, specifically, the Japanese /d/ versus the flapped /r/ which is sometimes produced as a retroflex. This study compared American and Japanese speakers' identification of the Hindi contrast in CV syllable contexts where C varied in voicing and aspiration. The study then evaluated the participants' increase in identifying the distinction after training with a computer-interactive program. Training sessions progressively increased in difficulty by decreasing the extent of vowel truncation in stimuli and by adding new speakers. Although all participants improved significantly, Japanese participants were more accurate than Americans in distinguishing the contrast on pretest, during training, and on posttest. Transfer was observed to three new consonantal contexts, a new vowel context, and a new speaker's productions. Some abstract aspect of the contrast was apparently learned during training. It is suggested that allophonic experience with dental and retroflex stops may be detrimental to perception of the new contrast.

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“…These two experiments were focused specifically on how well the two groups would make use of the acoustic cues available to identify unreleased stops, so the influence of lexical frequencies was minimized by using nonce word materials. Using nonce words also made the task in Experiment 2 especially difficult for the Korean group as word unfamiliarity has been shown to significantly worsen the perceptual performance of non-native listeners (Yamada et al, 1996;Mora, 2005). Listeners in these experiments heard either Korean nonce words in isolation (Experiment 1) or English nonce words at the end of a carrier sentence (Experiment 2) in a speeded identification task.…”

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confidence: 99%

Evidence for language transfer leading to a perceptual advantage for non-native listeners

Chang

Mishler

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Phonological transfer from the native language is a common problem for non-native speakers that has repeatedly been shown to result in perceptual deficits vis-a-vis native speakers. It was hypothesized, however, that transfer could help, rather than hurt, if it resulted in a beneficial bias. Due to differences in pronunciation norms between Korean and English, Koreans in the U.S. were predicted to be better than Americans at perceiving unreleased stops-not only in their native language (Korean) but also in their non-native language (English). In three experiments, Koreans were found to be significantly more accurate than Americans at identifying unreleased stops in Korean, at identifying unreleased stops in English, and at discriminating between the presence and absence of an unreleased stop in English. Taken together, these results suggest that cross-linguistic transfer is capable of boosting speech perception by non-natives beyond native levels.

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Effect of word familiarity on non-native phoneme perception: identification of English /r/, /l/ and /w/ by native speakers of Japanese

Cited by 27 publications

References 0 publications

Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners

Language Specificity in Speech Perception: Perception of Mandarin Tones by Native and Nonnative Listeners

Training the perception of Hindi dental and retroflex stops by native speakers of American English and Japanese

Evidence for language transfer leading to a perceptual advantage for non-native listeners

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