Exploring individual differences in native phonetic perception and their link to nonnative phonetic perception.

Abstract

Adults differ considerably in their perception of both native and nonnative phonemes. For instance, when presented with continua of native phonemes on two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) or visual analog scaling (VAS) tasks, some people show sudden changes in responses (i.e., steep identification slopes) and others show gradual changes (i.e., shallow identification slopes). Moreover, some adults are more successful than others at learning unfamiliar phonemes. The predictors of these individual differences and the relationships between them are poorly understood. It also remains unclear to what extent different tasks (2AFC vs. VAS) may reflect distinct individual differences in perception. In two experiments, we addressed these questions by examining the relationships between individual differences in performance on native and nonnative phonetic perception tasks. We found that shallow 2AFC identification slopes were not related to shallow VAS identification slopes but were related to inconsistent VAS responses. Additionally, our results suggest that consistent native perception may play a role in promoting successful nonnative perception. These findings help characterize the nature of individual differences in phonetic perception and contribute to our understanding of how to measure such differences. This work also has implications for encouraging successful acquisition of new languages in adulthood. Public Significance StatementSuccessfully perceiving speech sounds is a crucial skill for spoken communication; yet individuals show differences in how they perceive both native and nonnative speech sounds. We studied the relationships between performance on different native and nonnative speech perception tasks, finding that (a) different tasks measure different subtleties and (b) people with consistent perception of native speech sounds tend to be better at accurately perceiving nonnative sounds. These findings have implications for understanding the nature of individual differences in speech perception and for helping adults to learn new languages successfully.