Perception of English and Catalan vowels by English and Catalan listeners : A study of reciprocal cross-linguistic similarity
Cebrian, Juli (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Anglesa i de Germanística)

Imprint:	Acoustical Society of America, 2021
Description:	15 pàg.
Abstract:	This study reports the results of two experiments aimed at assessing the perceived similarity between English and Catalan vowels and diphthongs. Perceived similarity judgements were elicited from speakers of both languages involved and were compared to first language identification data from the same speakers. In experiment 1, a group of 27 naive Catalan listeners performed a perceptual assimilation task in which they were asked to identify Catalan and English vowels in terms of native categories and provide a goodness of fit rating. In experiment 2, a group of native speakers of Southern British English performed an adaptation of the same task. The results showed that most non-native vowels were consistently perceived as instances of a given native category, with varying degrees of goodness of fit. In a few cases, assimilation scores were very high in both experiments, pointing to the possibility of near-identical or shared categories. A few asymmetrical mappings were found, which were linked to the influence of language-specific cues such as the role of vowel duration in English. These results emphasize the importance of contrasting native and non-native perception and the potential of reciprocal approaches for making predictions about non-native perception and second language development.
Grants:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación FFI2017-88016-P Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2017/SGR-34
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Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió sotmesa a revisió
Subject:	Cues ; Multilingualism ; Language ; Humans ; Language Development ; Phonetics ; Speech Perception
Published in:	The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 149 Núm. 4 (2021) , p. 2671-2685, ISSN 1520-8524

DOI: 10.1121/10.0004257
PMID: 33940905

15 p, 585.1 KB

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