Discrimination of non-native consonant contrasts varying in perceptual assimilation to the listener’s native phonological system

Abstract

Classic non-native speech perception findings suggested that adults have difficulty discriminating segmental distinctions that are not employed contrastively in their own language. However, recent reports indicate a gradient of performance across non-native contrasts, ranging from near-chance to near-ceiling. Current theoretical models argue that such variations reflect systematic effects of experience with phonetic properties of native speech. The present research addressed predictions from Best's perceptual assimilation model (PAM), which incorporates both contrastive phonological and noncontrastive phonetic influences from the native language in its predictions about discrimination levels for diverse types of non-native contrasts. We evaluated the PAM hypotheses that discrimination of a non-native contrast should be near-ceiling if perceived as phonologically equivalent to a native contrast, lower though still quite good if perceived as a phonetic distinction between good versus poor exemplars of a single native consonant, and much lower if both non-native segments are phonetically equivalent in goodness of fit to a single native consonant. Two experiments assessed native English speakers' perception of Zulu and Tigrinya contrasts expected to fit those criteria. Findings supported the PAM predictions, and provided evidence for some perceptual differentiation of phonological, phonetic, and nonlinguistic information in perception of non-native speech. Theoretical implications for non-native speech perception are discussed, and suggestions are made for further research.

Comprehension of a novel accent by young and older listeners.

“…We implemented mixed-effect models using the lmer function in the lme4 package (Bates & Sarkar, 2005) in the R statistical program. We performed linear regression modeling to determine the predictive value of the background measures on SRTs and their interaction with the design variables accent and block.…”

Lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition

“…These are the two cases in BestÕs classification that are most obviously relevant to the vowel contrasts manipulated in Experiments 1 and 2. Note that BestÕs classification has been shown to account very well for the behavior of nonnative listeners in phoneme discrimination tasks, including Japanese perception of English consonants (Best & Strange, 1992), English perception of Zulu consonants (Best, McRoberts, & Sithole, 1988;Best, McRoberts, & Goodell, 2001), English perception of German vowels (Polka, 1995) and Japanese ratings of the goodness of fit of English consonants to Japanese categories (Guion, Flege, Akahane-Yamada, & Pruitt, 2000).…”

You'll see what you mean: Students encode equations based on their knowledge of arithmetic

“…According to this view, the patterns with which individuals gain experience become entrenched, and subsequently, novel information that overlaps with the patterns is assimilated to those patterns. This is beneficial when information matches the learned patterns, but can lead to errors when it does not (Best, McRoberts, & Goodell, 2001;Flege, Yeni Komshian, & Liu, 1999). If a stimulus overlaps with an entrenched pattern but does not match it exactly, the stimulus may be encoded inaccurately.…”