An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized

Faris, Mona; Best, Catherine T.; Tyler, Michael D.

doi:10.1121/1.4939608

Cited by 41 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…As mentioned above, the present article is based on a study of the perception of 11 British English monophthongs by Polish advanced learners of English acquiring L2 in a formal classroom setting. The aspects of perception investigated were discrimination and assimilation with goodness ratings and (dis-)similarity ratings, which allowed the following research questions to be addressed: For advanced learners in a formal learning setting and an L1-dominant environment, do discrimination rates for English vowel contrasts depend on assimilation types, as predicted by PAM?The predictions of PAM have previously been confirmed for non-native, unfamiliar consonants (e.g., Best and Strange 1992, Best et al 1988) and vowels (Tyler et al 2014, Faris et al 2016). Best and Tyler (2007) proposed a version of the model tailored to L2 learners in L2-dominant, naturalistic settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

English vowel perception by Polish advanced learners of English

Balas

2018

Can. J. Linguist.

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This article examines English vowel perception by advanced Polish learners of English in a formal classroom setting (i.e., they learnt English as a foreign language in school while living in Poland). The stimuli included 11 English noncewords in bilabial (/bVb/), alveolar (/dVd/) and velar (/gVg/) contexts. The participants, 35 first-year English majors, were examined during the performance of three tasks with English vowels: a categorial discrimination oddity task, an L1 assimilation task (categorization and goodness rating) and a task involving rating the (dis-)similarities between pairs of English vowels. The results showed a variety of assimilation types according to the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and the expected performance in a discrimination task. The more difficult it was to discriminate between two given vowels, the more similar these vowels were judged to be. Vowel contrasts involving height distinctions were easier to discriminate than vowel contrasts with tongue advancement distinctions. The results also revealed that the place of articulation of neighboring consonants had little effect on the perceptibility of the tested English vowels, unlike in the case of lower-proficiency learners. Unlike previous results for naïve listeners, the present results for advanced learners showed no adherence to the principles of the Natural Referent Vowel framework. Generally, the perception of English vowels by these Polish advanced learners of English conformed with PAM's predictions, but differed from vowel perception by naïve listeners and lower-proficiency learners.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

English vowel perception by Polish advanced learners of English

Balas

2018

Can. J. Linguist.

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“…Entropy was used to assess how consistently participants matched a given German allophone of /r/ to one vs. more Spanish phonemes in the cross-language perception task. Importantly, as a global measure accounting for overall response patterns, entropy avoids the need for arbitrary decisions about cut-off points that have previously been used to classify a given L2 phone as an L1 phoneme (e.g., Harnsberger, 2001;Bundgaard-Nielsen et al, 2011;Tyler et al, 2014;Faris et al, 2016). For instance, Faris et al (2016) used a criterion that, in a cross-language perception task, a non-native vowel had to be mapped onto a particular L1 vowel at least 50% of the time in order to be counted as consistently "categorized" as this vowel, while Tyler et al (2014) used a 70% and Harnsberger (2001) even a 90% criterion.…”

Section: Phonological Matchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Free Allophonic Variation on the Perception of Second Language Phonological Categories

2020

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When learning the phonological categories of a second language (L2), learners have to deal with phonetic variation. For instance, allophonic variant forms have to be recognized as the same phoneme. A minimal pair identification task was used to assess how late Spanish learners of German perceive the phonological /r/-/h/ contrast. German /r/ was realized as one of three allophones ([r], [R], [K]) that vary in phonetic similarity to /h/ as well as to the typical phonetic form of Spanish /r/ (i.e., [r]). Results showed that learners were very good at identifying all German variant forms (>90% correct). However, [K], which is phonetically closest to German /h/ and furthest from Spanish /r/, was identified significantly worse than [r] and [R]. Relating these results to a cross-language perception task where learners were asked to map the German allophones of /r/ and the phoneme /h/ to different L1 phonological categories further showed that those learners were best at identifying words with [K] who consistently matched it to a single L1 category. Surprisingly this category did not always have to be the phonologically matching Spanish /r/. We conclude that phonological and phonetic relations between the learners' L1 and L2 are important in identifying allophones of the same L2 category.

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“…On this hypothesis, listener categorization will be sensitive to the variation documented for these accents. An alternative hypothesis follows from the tendency for vowels to be weakly categorized in L2 (Bundgaard -Nielsen, Best & Tyler, 2011;Faris, Best & Tyler, 2016;Tyler, Best, Faber & Levitt, 2014) as well as in the native language (Pisoni, 1975;Repp, 1984). Compared with consonants, categorical boundaries are not as sharp for vowels.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Perceptual Assimilation Of Vowels Across Accentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience of English vowel perception across regional accent variation

Shaw

Best

Docherty

et al. 2018

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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In two categorization experiments using phonotactically legal nonce words, we tested Australian English listeners' perception of all vowels in their own accent as well as in four less familiar regional varieties of English which differ in how their vowel realizations diverge from Australian English: London, Yorkshire, Newcastle (UK), and New Zealand. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that amongst the vowel differences described in sociophonetic studies and attested in our stimulus materials, only a small subset caused greater perceptual difficulty for Australian listeners than for the corresponding Australian English vowels. We discuss this perceptual tolerance for vowel variation in terms of how perceptual assimilation of phonetic details into abstract vowel categories may contribute to recognizing words across variable pronunciations. Experiment 2 determined whether short-term multi-talker exposure would facilitate accent adaptation, particularly for those vowels that proved more difficult to categorize in Experiment 1. For each accent separately, participants listened to a pre-test passage in the nonce word accent but told by novel talkers before completing the same task as in Experiment 1. In contrast to previous studies showing rapid adaptation to talker-specific variation, our listeners' subsequent vowel assimilations were largely unaffected by exposure to other talkers' accent-specific variation.

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An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized

Cited by 41 publications

References 11 publications

English vowel perception by Polish advanced learners of English

English vowel perception by Polish advanced learners of English

The Impact of Free Allophonic Variation on the Perception of Second Language Phonological Categories

Resilience of English vowel perception across regional accent variation

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