| Title | Dental-to-velar perceptual assimilation: a cross-linguistic study of the perception of dental stop+/l/ clusters. | | Author(s) | Hallé PA, Best CT | | Institution | Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, 19 rue des Bernardins, 75005 Paris, France. pierre.halle@univ-paris5.fr | | Source | J Acoust Soc Am 2007 May; 121(5 Pt1):2899-914. | | Abstract | French listeners perceive illegal /tl/ and /dl/ clusters as legal /kl/ and /gl/, suggesting that /dl, tl/ undergo "phonotactic perceptual assimilation" to the phonetically most similar permissible clusters [Hallé et al., J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. (1998)]. However, without a comparison to native speakers of a language allowing initial /tl, dl/, other explanations remain open (e.g., universal phonetic biases). Experiment 1 compared native French and Hebrew listeners on perception of Hebrew /tl/-/kl/ and /dl/-/gl/. On a language-specific phonotactics account, these contrasts should be difficult for listeners whose language disallows initial /tl, dl/ while allowing /kl, gl/ (French), but not for listeners whose language permits all four clusters (Hebrew). Indeed, French but not Hebrew listeners showed difficulty discriminating /tl/-/kl/, and tended to categorize the initial consonant of /tl/ as /k/; analogous effects for /dl/-/gl/ were weaker. Experiment 2 tested speakers of American English, which also disallows initial /tl, dl/ but realizes stop-voicing differently than French or Hebrew, to examine possible contributions of language-specific phonetic settings. Their performance was similar to that of French listeners, though they had significantly greater difficulty with /dl-/gl/. The results support the proposal of language-specific phonotactic perceptual assimilation, with modest contributions from language-specific phonetic settings. | | Language | eng | | Pub Type(s) | Journal Article
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
| | PubMed ID | 17550188 |
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