Effects of phoneme repertoire

Abstract

In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from fivevowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g.,1is-tening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1,the listeners' native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3,the listeners' native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners' processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language's phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.Languages differ considerably in terms of the size of their phonemic repertoires. Although about two thirds of the world's languages make do with an inventory in the range of two to four dozen segments, the range of repertoire size is actually very extensive. At one end occur Polynesian languages, with fewer than 20 phonemes, and at the other end, African languages, with 140 or more (Maddieson, 1984). The relationship between different kinds of segments within the inventories also varies. Again, there is a preferred pattern whereby languages tend to contain almost twice as many consonants as vowels; but the vowel/ consonant ratio ranges from .065 to over 1.3.Are there perceptual consequences of cross-linguistic differences in phonemic inventory size? Assuming that languages are roughly equivalent in the number of word contrasts that they encode, it is reasonable to expect that languages with small inventories, allowing relatively few phoneme contrasts, will tend to have a larger number ofhomophonic word forms, or greater word length. Languages This research was supported by a grant from the Human Frontier Scientific Program, Grant AI96-26 from Acciones Integradas 1996 and Grant PB94-126 from the Spanish Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia. We thank Mark Scholten and Mariette Koster for assistance with the experiment in Dutch, C. Cortes for assistance with the Spanish experiments, Christophe Pallier and lames McQueen for useful discussions and comments on the paper, and Ann Bradlow and Bjorn Lindblom for helpful reviews. Correspondence should be addressed to A. Cutler, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310,6500 AH Nijmegen, the Netherlands (e-mail: anne.cutler@mpi.nl).with larger inventories, supporting relatively many contrasts, will be able to get by with shorter words and fewer homophones. Thus it can be argued that a reduction in the number of phonetic contrasts to be processed trad...

Consonant identification in noise by native and non-native listeners: Effects of local context

“…Especially in a difficult listening task such as consonant identification against a high level of babble noise, with no assistance available from any type of higher-level information, cues, of any kind, which reduce the uncertainty in the task will be very valuable. Constant vocalic contexts simplify consonant judgments in a variety of decision tasks ͑Costa et al., 1998;Swinney and Prather, 1980͒. Leading noise could make the speech onset temporally predictable.…”

The Identification of English Consonants by Native Speakers of Italian

“…Differences in long-term memory representations between native and nonnative speakers are known to slow early stages of phonetic processing [e.g. Costa et al, 1998], as well as to impair nonnatives' perception of synthetic speech [Greene et al, 1985] and distorted natural speech [Nabèleck and Donahue, 1984]. If one considers just the consonants that occur in a wide range of Italian words, only five of the 18 word-final English consonants that were examined in this study might be said to have an Italian phonetic counterpart, as compared to 16 of the 18 word-initial consonants (table 1).…”

“…Costa et al [1998Costa et al [ , p. 1030 observed that listeners are sensitive to 'the repertoire of possibilities their language offers', including the overall distribution of phonetic elements. Flege and Wang [1990] compared two groups of Chinese subjects living in the United States.…”

Phonological versus phonetic cues in native and non-native listening: Korean and Dutch listeners' perception of Dutch and English consonants

“…Although the timing of these refinements varies ͑Polka et al, 2001͒, the general developmental pattern is that sensitivity to phonetic differences which are phonologically noncontrastive in the native language becomes attenuated relative to sensitivity to contrastive phonetic differences, and that the degree of such an attenuation is typically correlated with age ͑e.g., Flege, 1995͒. Eventually, perception of speech sounds by adults is highly biased or modulated by their experience with the phonological systems of their native language ͑there are effects, e.g., of phoneme repertoire, phonotactics, allophonic distribution, rhythmic structure and morphophonemic alternations; see e.g., Best, 1995;Best and Strange, 1992;Costa et al, 1998;Cutler et al, 1986;Cutler and Otake, 1994;Flege, 1995;Flege and Hillenbrand, 1986;Hallé et al, 1999;Kuhl and Iverson, 1995;Otake et al, 1993;Weber, 2001;Weber and Cutler, 2006͒. Adult native Japanese listeners, for example, generally perceive both contrastive English sounds /r/ and /l/ as the flap /T/, which is the sound in their native language that is phonetically closest to the two sounds ͑e.g., Best et al, 1988;Best and Strange, 1992; see also Best, 1995͒.…”