Effects of lexical status on native and non-native English-speaking adults’ vowel perception

Abstract

Monolingual, English-speaking adults and native Chinese (Mandarin) speakers who learned English as a second language heard stimuli from two ‘‘native,’’ synthetic continua, in which the vowels ranged from English /i/ to /i/ in the context /b–b/ or /b–p/. Thus the end points of the first continuum constituted an English word and a nonword (‘‘bib’’ vs *‘‘beeb’’); the reverse held for the second continuum (*‘‘bip’’ vs ‘‘beep’’). These same subjects also heard stimuli from two ‘‘foreign’’ continua, where the vowels ranged from English /i/ to a foreign (non-English) vowel /Y/ in the contexts described above. Thus the end points of the first continuum corresponded to a word and a nonword (‘‘bib’’ vs *‘‘bYb’’); both end points of the second continuum corresponded to nonwords (*‘‘bip’’ vs *‘‘bYp’’). After training on end points, subjects’ identifications of the nine stimuli of a given continuum were examined to assess whether: the Chinese speakers, like native English speakers, exhibit a ‘‘lexical bias’’ effect for English vowels (from the native continua); vowel categories not bounded by another native/English vowel (as in the foreign continua) expand outward or become better defined with increased exposure to English and/or lexical status. [Work supported by NIH.]

Effects of lexical status on children’s and adults’ perception of native and non-native vowels

“…This was especially true in the native condition, where two of the four endpoints had lexical status; here, the overall proportion of correct identi"cations by 5-yr-olds was 0.90, vs. 0.86 in the foreign condition where only one endpoint was a Adults' slopes did appear steeper for the native continuum in Experiment 1 than for any of the continua in Experiment 2, perhaps because of the age discrepancy. However, we tested another group of young adults as in Experiment 2 and obtained similar results (Michela, Randazza, Walley & Flege, 1994). Therefore, the steeper slopes of Experiment 1 may be a spurious "nding or the result of some as yet unexamined factor, such as the di!erent initial consonant across experiments.…”