Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners

Abstract

Native American English and non-native ͑Dutch͒ listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios ͑0, 8, and 16 dB͒. The phoneme identification performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.

The perception of English front vowels by North Holland and Flemish listeners: Acoustic similarity predicts and explains cross-linguistic and L2 perception

“…English /ae/ was more frequently confused with English /e/ than the reverse. This finding runs counter to the results of Cutler et al (2004), as described in Section 1.1, who found no asymmetry in their English categorization task. One difference between the studies is that the stimuli used in Weber and Cutler (2004) and in the present study are Standard Southern British English (SSBE), while Cutler et al (2004) used American English (AE) stimuli (see Section 1.2).…”

“…This finding runs counter to the results of Cutler et al (2004), as described in Section 1.1, who found no asymmetry in their English categorization task. One difference between the studies is that the stimuli used in Weber and Cutler (2004) and in the present study are Standard Southern British English (SSBE), while Cutler et al (2004) used American English (AE) stimuli (see Section 1.2). The acoustic properties of AE /e/ and /ae/ from Hillenbrand, Getty, Clark, and Wheeler (1995), who report on vowels produced by male speakers of the same dialect as that considered in Cutler et al (2004), show little difference in F1 (5.6 versus 5.7 Bark) or F2 (12.3 versus 12.9 Bark) for the two vowels.…”

“…1 Cutler et al hence did not confirm that the asymmetry observed in word recognition applied equally to sound categorization. One possible reason for this somehow paradoxical result might be due to the fact that Weber and Cutler (2004), who observed an asymmetry in word recognition, used tokens produced by a SSBE speaker, while Cutler et al (2004) used tokens produced by an AE speaker. The present study seeks to examine whether the asymmetry can be found in an English sound categorization task that uses stimuli produced by the same SSBE speaker who spoke Weber and Cutler's (2004) stimuli and who was recorded under the same conditions of this previous study.…”

“…One difference between the studies is that the stimuli used in Weber and Cutler (2004) and in the present study are Standard Southern British English (SSBE), while Cutler et al (2004) used American English (AE) stimuli (see Section 1.2). The acoustic properties of AE /e/ and /ae/ from Hillenbrand, Getty, Clark, and Wheeler (1995), who report on vowels produced by male speakers of the same dialect as that considered in Cutler et al (2004), show little difference in F1 (5.6 versus 5.7 Bark) or F2 (12.3 versus 12.9 Bark) for the two vowels. It is well known that AE makes a clear duration distinction between /e/ and /ae/ (Hillenbrand et al, 1995, Table V).…”

Novel second-language words and asymmetric lexical access

“…In addition, the authors appeal to previous perception studies to suggest that Dutch /e/ is the closest phonemic match for both English vowels. That is, a number of perceptual identification studies (Broersma, 2005;Cutler, Weber, Smits, & Cooper, 2004) show a perceptual bias towards English /e/ when Dutch listeners classify tokens containing the two English vowels. However, this /e/ bias may also have another explanation, which is developed and further tested in Cutler, Weber, and Otake (2006).…”