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Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms
Published on: February 8, 2019
Flexible cue use in nonnative phonetic categorization.
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Nonnative English listeners flexibly adapted to vowel duration cues for /v/ versus /f/ categorization. Native English listeners consistently relied on these cues, unlike Dutch listeners who initially used them but then reduced their reliance.
Area of Science:
- Phonetics and Phonology
- Auditory Perception
- Second Language Acquisition
Background:
- Cross-linguistic differences in phoneme perception can impact second language (L2) learning.
- Vowel duration is a known cue for distinguishing voiced and voiceless consonants in some languages.
- Previous research indicated English listeners use vowel duration for /v/-/f/ categorization, but Dutch listeners do not.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how native English and native Dutch listeners categorize English nonwords differing in final fricatives (/v/ vs. /f/).
- To examine the role of preceding vowel duration as a cue in this categorization task.
- To compare the adaptation strategies of native and nonnative listeners to potentially misleading acoustic cues.
Main Methods:
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Main Results:
- Both native English and native Dutch listeners initially used vowel duration to distinguish /v/ and /f/.
- Native English listeners consistently relied on vowel duration throughout the experiment.
- Native Dutch listeners, despite initial use, significantly reduced their reliance on vowel duration over time.
Conclusions:
- Nonnative listeners (Dutch) demonstrated more flexible adaptation to acoustic cues than native listeners (English).
- The findings highlight dynamic cue weighting in nonnative speech perception.
- This suggests nonnative listeners can adjust their perceptual strategies based on input, even when native listeners do not.