The effect of first language perception on the discrimination of a non-native vowel contrast: investigating individual differences
- Autores: Vita Kogan
- Directores de la Tesis: Joan Carles Mora Bonilla (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Valerie Hazan (presid.), Natalia Fullana (secret.), Susanne Maria Reiterer (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Lingüísticos, Literarios y Culturales por la Universidad de Barcelona
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Adult language learners often experience difficulty acquiring a new sound system. Empirical studies have shown that native phonetic categories function as a filter that removes specific acoustic cues for non-native sounds and causes “a perceptual accent”. Not being able to perceive contrastive segment categories that do not exist in learner’s native language result in production problems and accented speech. Yet, some individuals are remarkably successful at the task of non-native perception. Such instances demonstrate that perceptual ability is a subject of high variability. Whereas native language (L1) background has been the focus of much second language acquisition research to explain such variability, little attention has been paid to the role of individual differences within the same L1 perception. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap and investigate how individual differences in native perception affect the degree of perceived dissimilarity between two members of a novel contrast that does not exist in learners’ L1. We argue that not only individuals with various L1s are equipped differently for the task of non-native perception, but also individuals with the same L1 vary in how their native phonological categories are represented in the perceptual space. Such variability is observable in measures of compactness of L1 phonetic categories, and its effects on non-native perception can be assessed by relating the degree of compactness to the perceived dissimilarity between novel contrasting sounds. We hypothesized that compact L1 categories give an initial advantage in distinguishing non-native contrasts.
Sixty-eight Spanish monolinguals participated in the present study. The degree of compactness of their native category /i/ was measured through a goodness-of-fit rating task, where participants listened to synthesized variants of the Spanish /i/ vowel (differing in F1, F2 or both) and rated them as either good or bad exemplars of their internal representation of the category /i/ on an intuitive scale. These ratings provided an individual /i/ compactness index for each participant that was related to the individual perceived dissimilarity score for the novel Russian contrast /i - ɨ/. The results obtained confirmed the hypothesis. Even though L1-based individual differences in perception were small, compactness of the L1 category /i/ contributed significantly to the participants’ ability to perceive the acoustic distance between the Russian /i/ and /ɨ/. These findings suggest that having more compact vowel categories might facilitate the process of category formation for unfamiliar sounds.
Keywords: individual differences, phonetic ability, speech perception, phonetic category compactness
