SummerFest 2005 Plenary Presenter

Title

Chair in Psycholinguistic Research
MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney
and Haskins Laboratories

Abstract

Language-Specific Attunement of Speech Perception

Much evidence indicates that experience with the native language places strong and systematic constraints on speech perception in adults. Discrimination of non-native consonant and vowel contrasts has often been observed to be substantially reduced, in comparison to perception of native phonetic contrasts. Categorization or identification of such non-native contrasts is also hindered, not surprisingly. Young infants, however, display an initial, universal ability to discriminate speech sounds from both the ambient language and unfamiliar languages. Thus, language experience clearly must have a “tuning” effect on perception of speech that emerges at some point between these two developmental endpoints. Research over the past 25 years indicates that perceptual influences from the native language begins to be evident quite early: by 10 months of age for consonant contrasts, and by 6 months for vowel contrasts. This talk will examine how and why experience with the native language comes to shape perception not only native phonetic contrasts, but especially of non-native ones. Of special interest will be findings indicating that although many non-native consonant and vowel contrasts are difficult for adults to categorize and discriminate, not all of them cause perceptual difficulties. In fact, some are quite easy to discriminate and categorize, despite being quite deviant from anything in the native phonological system, while perception of others falls somewhere in between the high and low performance extremes. Key findings on the range of effects in non-native speech perception will be described and discussed. Various theoretical accounts of non-native speech perception will be examined in light of those findings, with particular emphasis on the Perceptual Assimilation Model I and my colleagues developed to address the range of perceptual variations across non-native contrasts and even across listener languages.