Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Sally
This study investigated cross-language and cross-dialect differences in vowel perception. Three groups of listeners were recruited, American English listeners, Australian English listeners, and Dutch listeners. These participants were asked to identify English vowels in CV and VC syllables produced by a phonetically trained American English speaker. The stimuli were embedded in babbles of three SNRs (0 dB, 8 dB, 16 dB) based on a pretest yielding easy, intermediate, and difficult phoneme perception, respectively. Results showed that in terms of accuracy, no significant difference was observed between Australian and American listeners, but Dutch listeners performed worse than Australian listeners. This finding was supported in the percentage of transmitted information examined via vowel height, backness, and tenseness: Australian listeners were significantly better than Dutch listeners in identifying all three vowel features. Confusion matrices were also plotted to show whether different levels of perceptual difficulties are attributed to cross-language/ cross-dialectal inventory differences. In general, the Australian listeners’ judgments were more variable than those of the American listeners, and this is ascribed to the mismatches of phonetic boundaries between dialects of the same language. Interference across languages is far greater, as Dutch listeners showed more confusion during the task. Different repertoires of phonemic categories between English and their native language are presumed to be the reason of this more serious perceptual difficulty.
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