Native language experience influences the perceived similarity of second language vowel categories.

Abstract

The dynamics of spoken word recognition are acutely sensitive to competition among similar-sounding words. Here, we take advantage of this sensitivity to examine the manner in which native Italian speakers who are late learners of English perceive English vowels. Native Italian speakers and native English speakers listened to recordings of naturally produced words ("pin," "pen," and "pan") and used a computer mouse to select the matching stimulus from an array of two pictures. The same participants also performed a similarity judgment task. The perceptual similarity space for these vowel categories differed between groups, and these differences were also reflected in the dynamics of performance in the online measure. The results are largely interpretable in terms of models of second-language speech perception that predict performance from patterns of assimilation to native language categories. The results suggest, however, that there are also effects of graded differences in the perceptual similarity of categories as measured in native speakers of the target language.

Perception of English vowels by Javanese and Sundanese speakers; A mouse-tracking study

“…Area Under the Curve (AUC) is the area between the observed mouse trajectory and an idealized straight-line trajectory drawn from the beginning and end points (Freeman et al 2011). Farmer et al (2009) examine how Italian speakers perceive the pen-pan and pin-pan English contrasts. The Italian speakers moved their trajectories closer to the competitor in the pen-pan condition than in the pin-pan condition, indicating that the perception of the pen-pan condition is more difficult than the pin-pan condition.…”

Processing, Evaluation, Knowledge

“…Mouse tracking has been used predominantly outside of linguistic research, for instance on studies exploring the activation of social stereotypes (Dale, Kehoe & Spivey 2007; Freeman & Ambady 2009, 2010; Freeman et al 2011). The paradigm has also been used within psycholinguistics to study lexical competition effects (Spivey, Grosjean & Knoblich 2005; Farmer et al 2009), the role of visual information in garden-path effects (Farmer, Anderson & Spivey 2007), and the interpretation of grammatical aspect (Anderson et al 2008). For example, in Anderson et al (2008), the researchers played participants narratives using either simple past tense (e.g., the man walked ) or past progressive (e.g., the man was walking ) verb forms.…”

Delayed processing in accented speech: Evidence from a mouse-tracking experiment

“…Mouse-tracking allows continuous tracking of information integration in a way that ballistic eye movements do not permit. To our knowledge, this application remains rather novel, as only a handful of studies have incorporated mousetracking for the study of speech perception decisions (Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich, 2005;Farmer, Liu, Mehta, & Zevin, 2009;Krestar, Incera, & McLennan, 2013).…”