Cross-language flexibility of phoneme boundaries

Reinisch, E., Weber, A., & Mitterer, H. (2011). Cross-language flexibility of phoneme boundaries. Poster presented at the 13th NVP Winter Conference on Cognition, Brain, and Behaviour of the Dutch Psychonomic Society, Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.
Listeners can use lexical knowledge to retune category boundaries of their native language to adapt to non-canonically produced phonemes. We asked whether phoneme boundaries in a second language are equally flexible, and whether perceptual learning transfers across languages. During a lexical decision task, German and Dutch listeners were exposed to "odd" pronunciation variants of a Dutch native speaker. Word-final [f] or [s] was replaced by an ambiguous sound. At test listeners categorized Dutch minimal word pairs ending in sounds along an [f]-[s] continuum. First as well as second language listeners (i.e., Dutch and German) showed boundary shifts of a similar magnitude. Moreover, following exposure to Dutch-accented English, Dutch listeners also showed effects of category retuning during test where they heard the same speaker speak her native language, Dutch. This suggests that first, lexical representations in a second language are specific enough to support lexically-guided retuning and second, that production patterns in a second language are deemed a stable speaker characteristic. Thus speaker-specific category retuning is used across languages.
Publication type
Poster
Publication date
2011

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