The relationship between native allophonic experience with vowel duration and perception of the English tense/lax vowel contrast by Spanish and Russian listeners

Abstract

Two studies explored the role of native language use of an acoustic cue, vowel duration, in both native and non-native contexts in order to test the hypothesis that non-native listeners' reliance on vowel duration instead of vowel quality to distinguish the English tense/lax vowel contrast could be explained by the role of duration as a cue in native phonological contrasts. In the first experiment, native Russian, Spanish, and American English listeners identified stimuli from a beat/bit continuum varying in nine perceptually equal spectral and duration steps. English listeners relied predominantly on spectrum, but showed some reliance on duration. Russian and Spanish speakers relied entirely on duration. In the second experiment, three tests examined listeners' use of vowel duration in native contrasts. Duration was equally important for the perception of lexical stress for all three groups. However, English listeners relied more on duration as a cue to postvocalic consonant voicing than did native Spanish or Russian listeners, and Spanish listeners relied on duration more than did Russian listeners. Results suggest that, although allophonic experience may contribute to cross-language perceptual patterns, other factors such as the application of statistical learning mechanisms and the influence of language-independent psychoacoustic proclivities cannot be ruled out.

Immediate and Distracted Imitation in Second-Language Speech: Unreleased Plosives In English

“…Previous research has demonstrated that allophonic experience from learners' native language improves both perception of non-native contrasts as well as their learning. (Best and Strange 1992;Halle et al 1999;Jamieson and Moroson 1986;Jenkins and Yeni-Komshian 1995;Kondaurova and Francis 2008;McAllister et al 2002;McClaskey et al 1983;Pisoni et al 1982;Pruitt et al 2006). The current results suggest that such experience also contributes to imitation.…”

Perception of Welsh vowel contrasts by Welsh-Spanish bilinguals in Argentina

“…They also support the prediction that complete acquisition of L2 contrasts is difficult for speakers of a native language which does not rely on the relevant acoustic cues for phonemic discrimination. These results support previous work claiming the primacy of duration as a cue to vowel identity (over vowel quality) by non-native speakers (Kondaurova & Francis 2008, Flege 2007). …”

Differential cue weighting in perception and production of consonant voicing

“…Kondaurova and Francis, 2008), to obtain standardized logit coefficients, or b weights, as a measure of the strength of the contribution of each variable (VOT and onset f0) to the category ([b] or [p]) as shown in Fig. 1(b).…”