Individual Differences in Categorical Judgment of L2 Stops: A Link to Proficiency and Acoustic Cue-Weighting

Kong, Eun Jong; Kang, Soyoung

doi:10.1177/00238309221108647

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 85 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Although our preregistered analyses revealed a somewhat surprising lack of evidence for a relationship between native and nonnative perception, similar findings have been reported in the past. For instance, other work has found that gradiency of native perception on a VAS task did not relate to nonnative discrimination ability (Fuhrmeister et al, 2023) or to scores on a standardized nonnative proficiency task (Kong & Kang, 2022). It may be that native gradiency does not relate strongly to nonnative outcomes due to differences in some of the processing strategies involved.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gradiency (as measured by VAS tasks) appears to be a relatively consistent property of the individual. It has been shown to be related across different testing sessions using the same stimuli (Kong & Edwards, 2016), across different contrasts (Fuhrmeister & Myers, 2021; Kapnoula & McMurray, 2021; but see Kapnoula et al, 2021 for contrasting evidence), and across native and nonnative perception (Kong & Kang, 2022). Individual differences in gradiency may reflect anatomical differences in auditory processing architecture, since they relate to differences in cortical surface area (Fuhrmeister & Myers, 2021) and in how cues are neurally encoded and transformed along the auditory pathway (Kapnoula & McMurray, 2021; Ou & Yu, 2022).…”

Section: Individual Differences In Native Speech Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, gradiency can reflect experience-related sensitivity to fine acoustic detail, with trained speech-language pathologists giving VAS ratings that are more closely related to acoustic characteristics of the signal compared to inexperienced listeners (Munson et al, 2012). In addition, more gradient VAS responses have been associated with an increased ability to integrate multiple acoustic cues in the speech signal (Kapnoula et al, 2017; Kapnoula & McMurray, 2021; Kim et al, 2020; Kong & Edwards, 2016; Kong & Kang, 2022). Gradiency thus relates to the ability to integrate multiple acoustic cues and to perceive fine-tuned changes in those cues, which appears to encourage perceptual flexibility in the face of ambiguous input (Clayards et al, 2008; Desmeules-Trudel & Zamuner, 2019).…”

Section: Individual Differences In Native Speech Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, Fuhrmeister et al (2023) tested only consonants (no native or nonnative vowels). Even though gradiency appears to be a relatively stable individual property that holds across different speech sounds as described above (Fuhrmeister & Myers, 2021; Kapnoula & McMurray, 2021; Kong & Edwards, 2016; Kong & Kang, 2022), certain sounds such as consonants are likely to elicit gradient responses to a lesser degree because listeners typically show greater sensitivity to within-category differences in vowels than in consonants (e.g., Fry et al, 1962; M. E. H. Schouten & Van Hessen, 1992).…”

Section: Individual Differences In Native Speech Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Exploring individual differences in native phonetic perception and their link to nonnative phonetic perception.

Honda,

Clayards,

Baum

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Adults differ considerably in their perception of both native and nonnative phonemes. For instance, when presented with continua of native phonemes on two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) or visual analog scaling (VAS) tasks, some people show sudden changes in responses (i.e., steep identification slopes) and others show gradual changes (i.e., shallow identification slopes). Moreover, some adults are more successful than others at learning unfamiliar phonemes. The predictors of these individual differences and the relationships between them are poorly understood. It also remains unclear to what extent different tasks (2AFC vs. VAS) may reflect distinct individual differences in perception. In two experiments, we addressed these questions by examining the relationships between individual differences in performance on native and nonnative phonetic perception tasks. We found that shallow 2AFC identification slopes were not related to shallow VAS identification slopes but were related to inconsistent VAS responses. Additionally, our results suggest that consistent native perception may play a role in promoting successful nonnative perception. These findings help characterize the nature of individual differences in phonetic perception and contribute to our understanding of how to measure such differences. This work also has implications for encouraging successful acquisition of new languages in adulthood. Public Significance StatementSuccessfully perceiving speech sounds is a crucial skill for spoken communication; yet individuals show differences in how they perceive both native and nonnative speech sounds. We studied the relationships between performance on different native and nonnative speech perception tasks, finding that (a) different tasks measure different subtleties and (b) people with consistent perception of native speech sounds tend to be better at accurately perceiving nonnative sounds. These findings have implications for understanding the nature of individual differences in speech perception and for helping adults to learn new languages successfully.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%