An effect of linguistic experience: The discrimination of [r] and [l] by native speakers of Japanese and English.
| Number | 194 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1975 |
| Drawer | 4 |
| Entry Date | 09/08/1998 |
| Authors | Miyawaki, K., Strange, W., Verbrugge, R., Liberman, A. M., Jenkins, J. J., & Fujimura, O. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Perception & Psychophysics, 18, 331-340. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0194.pdf |
| Abstract | Tested 21 Japanese and 39 American adults on discrimination of a set of synthetic speech-like stimuli. The 13 stimuli in this set varied in the initial stationary frequency of the 3rd formant (F3) and its subsequent transition into the vowel over a range sufficient to produce the perception of (ra) and (la) for American Subjects and to produce (ra) (which is not in phonemic contrast to (la)) for Japanese Subjects. Discrimination tests of a comparable set of stimuli consisting of the isolated F3 components provided a "nonspeech" control. For Americans, the discrimination of the speech stimuli was nearly categorical (e.g., comparison pairs identified as different phonemes were discriminated with high accuracy, while pairs identified as the same phoneme were discriminated relatively poorly). In comparison, discrimination of speech stimuli by Japanese Subjects was only slightly better than chance for all comparison pairs. Highly accurate performance on nonspeech stimuli, however, was virtually identical for Japanese and American Subjects. Results suggest that the effect of linguistic experience is specific to perception in the speech mode. |
| Notes |
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