Imitation of a VOT continuum by native speakers of English and Spanish: Evidence for phonetic category formation

Abstract

This study examined imitation of a voice onset time (VOT) continuum ranging from/da/to/ta/by by subjects differing in age and/or linguistic experience. The subjects did not reproduce the incremental increases in VOT linearly, but instead showed abrupt shifts in VOT between two or three VOT response "modes." The location of the response shifts occurred at the same location as phoneme boundaries obtained in a previous identification experiment. This supports the view that the stimuli were categorized before being imitated. Children and adults who spoke just Spanish generally produced only lead and short-lag VOT responses. English monolinguals tended to produce stops with only short-lag and long-lag VOT values. The native Spanish adults and children who spoke English, on the other hand, produced stops with VOT values falling into all three model VOT ranges. This was interpreted to mean that they had established a phonetic category [th] with which to implement the voiceless aspirated realizations of /t/ in English. Their inability to produce English /p,t,k/ with the same values as native speakers of English must therefore be attributed to the information specified in their new English phonetic categories (which might be incorrect as the result of exposure to Spanish-accented English), to partially formed phonetic realization rules, or both.

Effects of acoustic–phonetic detail on cross-language speech production

“…The fact that imitation was only partial, with responses being constrained by phonetic or phonological categories more than would be expected from pure mimicry, agrees with many previous studies (Nielsen, 2011;Zellou, Scarborough, & Nielsen, 2013). Previous studies of cross-language phonetic imitation have generated mixed results (Flege & Eefting, 1988;Oh & Redford, 2012;Olmstead, Viswanathan, Aivar, & Manuel, 2013;Yeni-Komshian, Caramazza, & Preston, 1977). It is likely that immediate repetition tasks such as the one employed here highlight phonetic properties-and mitigate the influence of dialectal and sociolinguistic affinity (Abrego-Collier, Grove, Sonderegger, & Yu, 2011;Babel, 2012;Kim, Horton, & Bradlow, 2011), shared lexical experience (Johnson, 2006), and other metalinguistic factors (see Chang, 2012 for a review)-relative to tasks involving meaningful communication or language learning, which may elicit weaker imitation effects.…”

Perception and Production of Consonants of English by Pakistani Speakers

“…Languages like Arabic (Flege & Port, 1981), Saraiki , Dutch (Simon, 2009(Simon, , 2011, Spanish (Flege & Eefting, 1988), Russian (Backley, 2011), Japanese (Shimizu, 2011), Hungarian (Lisker & Abramson, 1964, etc. are considered voicing languages but German (Hamann, 2011), English (Honeybone, 2005), Swedish, Korean, Icelandic (Backley, 2011), etc.…”

Speech sound acquisition, coarticulation, and rate effects in a neural network model of speech production.

“…Relatedly, Flege and Eefting (1988) and Flege (1991Flege ( , 1993 have argued that learners of a second language must establish appropriate phonetic categories before they can reliably January 31, 1995 1.1 produce the correct phonemes in the second language. The present model's assumption that the perceptual category for a sonnd exists before the orosensory target for that sound is learned is consistent with this hypothesis.…”