Discrimination of Multiple Coronal Stop Contrasts in Wubuy (Australia): A Natural Referent Consonant Account

Abstract

Native speech perception is generally assumed to be highly efficient and accurate. Very little research has, however, directly examined the limitations of native perception, especially for contrasts that are only minimally differentiated acoustically and articulatorily. Here, we demonstrate that native speech perception may indeed be more difficult than is often assumed, where phonemes are highly similar, and we address the nature and extremes of consonant perception. We present two studies of native and non-native (English) perception of the acoustically and articulatorily similar four-way coronal stop contrast /t ʈ ȶ/ (apico-alveolar, apico-retroflex, lamino-dental, lamino-alveopalatal) of Wubuy, an indigenous language of Australia. The results show that all listeners find contrasts involving /ȶ/ easy to discriminate, but that, for both groups, contrasts involving /t ʈ / are much harder. Where the two groups differ, the results largely reflect native language (Wubuy vs English) attunement as predicted by the Perceptual Assimilation Model [1, 2, 3]. We also observe striking perceptual asymmetries in the native listeners' perception of contrasts involving the latter three stops, likely due to the differences in input frequency. Such asymmetries have not previously been observed in adults, and we propose a novel Natural Referent Consonant Hypothesis to account for the results.

Asymmetries in the perception of Mandarin tones: Evidence from mismatch negativity.

“…One proposal for why peripheral vowels act as natural referent vowels is that they serve as “anchors” that mark the extent of the vowel space for a speaker and thus aid in talker normalization; Yeung and colleagues (2013) have suggested that Cantonese tones that cover most of the pitch space may have a similar effect, but this would not explain the present results because T3 covers less of the pitch space than T4 and yet clearly showed a perceptual bias over T4 in our experiments. Another proposal is that the vowels which are most distinguishable from each other serve as natural referent vowels (Bundgaard-Nielsen et al, 2015), but this also does not appear to apply to the present results. For example, T3 and T4 are much more distinguishable from each other than T3 is from T2 (Howie, 1968), which would suggest that these tones might be perceptual anchors compared to T2 and thus would each show asymmetries with T2 and not with each other; however, T3 showed a strong asymmetry with T4.…”

“…Another possibility is that the asymmetry is not due to greater acoustic salience of T3, but to a cross-linguistic perceptual bias toward this tone. Such cross-linguistic perceptual biases are well documented in the perception of vowels, where peripheral (as opposed to central) vowels have been argued to act as natural referent vowels (Polka & Bohn, 2011); natural referent consonants have also been proposed to exist in the perception of consonant place of articulation (Bundgaard-Nielsen, Baker, Kroos, Harvey, & Best, 2015). It is unclear, however, how such an account would translate into tone perception.…”

Not “weird” but truly different: Cultural life scripts and autobiographical memory in indigenous Australia.

“…Some participants had previously participated in research conducted by the second author, while others had not. The author’s previous research is overwhelmingly in the field of experimental psycholinguistics (Baker et al, 2014; Bundgaard-Nielsen & Baker, 2016, 2019, 2020; Bundgaard-Nielsen et al, 2015, 2016; Bundgaard-Nielsen et al, 2012), not in traditional field-linguistics in the anthropological tradition, and we do not believe that previous research experiences with the author primed the participants to respond or focus their responses in any particular way as the topics included in the CLSs and the important memories are not typically addressed in the research of the second author. The interviews were conducted in English.…”

“…This means that biological relationship alone cannot necessarily be used to determine an individual’s childrearing roles, experiences or responsibilities. Twelve of the participants were interviewed by the second author, who has a long-standing research partnership with the participants, primarily for the purpose of linguistic fieldwork in the community (Baker et al, 2014; Bundgaard-Nielsen & Baker, 2016, 2019, 2020; Bundgaard-Nielsen, Baker, Kroos, Harvey, & Best, 2015; Bundgaard-Nielsen, Kroos, Baker, Best, & Harvey, 2016; Bundgaard-Nielsen, Kroos, Harvey, Baker, & Best, 2012). One (of three) male participant was interviewed by a male linguist known to the participant, to conform to cultural norms in the community.…”

Statistical and acoustic effects on the perception of stop consonants in Kaqchikel (Mayan)

“…As each participant heard one of 30 different lists of stimulus pairs (Section 3.1.2), List was also included as a random intercept. The order of the two stimuli in a given trial (Stimulus Order) was included as another random intercept, since the order of stimulus presentation has been reported to affect same-different discrimination judgments in some tasks (Best et al, 2001;Bundgaard-Nielsen, Baker, Kroos, Harvey, & Best, 2015;Cowan & Morse, 1986;Dar, Keren-Portnoy, & Vihman, 2018;Repp & Crowder, 1990).…”