No abstract

No abstract

Perceptual effects of orthogonal variations in temporal and spectral information differentiating French /o/ and /o/ were examined. Although both parameters contribute to acoustic differentiation of /o/ and /o/, the phonetic and phonological structure of French suggests that duration might be a less important perceptual property in French than in languages like American English. Three 10-step /kot/-/kot/ continua were synthesized by systematically varying frequencies of the first two formants of the vowel nuclei. The three continua differed in vowel duration (140, 180, and 220 msec). Two perceptual tests, identification and 5-choice category rating, were presented to three listener groups: native French, native American English who had studied French, and native American English who did not know French. For both native American English groups, spectrally ambiguous vowels were identified and rated more often as /o/ when these vowels were long and as /o/ when short, thereby showing a trading relation between temporal and spectral information. In contrast, native French listeners showed little effect of duration in either perceptual task. Despite this perceptual insensitivity to duration, acoustic measurements showed that these French subjects' productions of /o/ and /o/ consistently maintained a duration difference. Results are interpreted to support the view that perceptual integration of the acoustic properties relevant to a phonemic contrast depends not only on covariation of the properties in the production of that contrast, but also on the prominence of this covariation in the language's phonological system.

Second language (L2) learners differ considerably in their ability to learn new phonetic contrasts in the L2. For example, Gottfried and Suiter (1997) observed that many native speakers of American English were highly accurate in their identification of Mandarin Chinese tones, while others, with similar years of experience in learning Mandarin, were very poor. The current study compared listeners’ identification of Mandarin tones with their ability to perceive the pitch direction of sine-wave glides. Sine waves of 400 ms with starting frequencies of 250 and 300 Hz were created with 0- to 50-Hz sweeps up or down from the initial frequencies. Listeners who had no experience with Mandarin indicated whether the pitch went up, down, or remained the same. After testing on the sine waves, listeners identified the tone (high-level, mid-rising, low-dipping, and high-falling) of intact and silent-center (with only the initial and final portions) Mandarin /l/-vowel syllables. Analysis revealed that listeners with musical training performed significantly better on intact Mandarin syllables than nonmusic majors, but no difference was observed for silent-centers. Voice majors seemed to have a particular advantage. Significant correlations were also found between tests of glide perception and tone identification (ranging from 0.530 to 0.642).