Studies in cross-language speech perception

Abstract

Three cross-language experiments are reported investigating aspects of the functional separation of phonetic and phonological levels of processing in speech perception. The first experiment presents additional evidence from French to supplement findings from Bengali, Hindi and English (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Ohala and Ohala, 1995), on the perception of vowel nasal resonance and its implications for abstract lexical representations and processing strategies in speech perception. The second and third experiments compare Korean and Japanese learners of English on the perception of consonant and vowel contrasts in Australian English, investigating how phonological transfer effects interact with the phonetic discriminability of speech sounds and the normalisation strategies that listeners use to separate linguistic and non-linguistic sources of phonetic variability. These cross-linguistic studies provide new evidence on the relationship between phonetic and phonological levels of processing in speech perception, and the conditions under which listeners will employ one or the other level in responding to ‘foreign’ sounds in a second-language-learning context.