Listeners retune phoneme categories across languages.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance Listeners Retune Phoneme Categories Across Languages

Phoneme category retuning in a non-native language

Previous studies have demonstrated that native listeners modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker produces an ambiguous sound in order to quickly tune into a speaker, but there is hardly any evidence that non-native listeners employ a similar mechanism when encountering ambiguous pronunciations. So far, one study demonstrated this lexically-guided perceptual learning effect f...

Lexically guided phonetic retuning of foreign-accented speech and its generalization.

Listeners use lexical knowledge to retune phoneme categories. When hearing an ambiguous sound between /s/ and /f/ in lexically unambiguous contexts such as gira[s/f], listeners learn to interpret the sound as /f/ because gira[f] is a real word and gira[s] is not. Later, they apply this learning even in lexically ambiguous contexts (perceiving knife rather than nice). Although such retuning coul...

Identification of Phonemes: Differences between Phoneme Classes and the Effect of Class Size

This study reports general and language-specific patterns in phoneme identification. In a series of phoneme monitoring experiments, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, English, and Polish listeners identified vowel, fricative, and stop consonant targets that are phonemic in all these languages, embedded in nonsense words. Fricatives were generally identified more slowly than vowels, while the sp...

Comparing lexically guided perceptual learning in younger and older listeners.

Numerous studies have shown that younger adults engage in lexically guided perceptual learning in speech perception. Here, we investigated whether older listeners are also able to retune their phonetic category boundaries. More specifically, in this research we tried to answer two questions. First, do older adults show perceptual-learning effects of similar size to those of younger adults? Seco...