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Cross-Linguistic Perceptual Categorization of the Three Corner Vowels: Effects of Listener Language and Talker Age
- Source :
- Language and Speech. 64:558-575
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- SAGE Publications, 2020.
-
Abstract
- The present study examined the center and size of naïve adult listeners’ vowel perceptual space (VPS) in relation to listener language (LL) and talker age (TA). Adult listeners of three different first languages, American English, Greek, and Korean, categorized and rated the goodness of different vowels produced by 2-year-olds and 5-year-olds and adult speakers of those languages, and speakers of Cantonese and Japanese. The center (i.e., mean first and second formant frequencies (F1 and F2)) and size (i.e., area in the F1/F2 space) of VPSs that were categorized either into /a/, /i/, or /u/ were calculated for each LL and TA group. All center and size calculations were weighted by the goodness rating of each stimulus. The F1 and F2 values of the vowel category (VC) centers differed significantly by LL and TA. These effects were qualitatively different for the three vowel categories: English listeners had different /a/ and /u/ centers than Greek and Korean listeners. The size of VPSs did not differ significantly by LL, but did differ by TA and VCs: Greek and Korean listeners had larger vowel spaces when perceiving vowels produced by 2-year-olds than by 5-year-olds or adults, and English listeners had larger vowel spaces for /a/ than /i/ or /u/. Findings indicate that vowel perceptual categories of listeners varied by the nature of their native vowel system, and were sensitive to TA.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Linguistics and Language
medicine.medical_specialty
Sociology and Political Science
First language
media_common.quotation_subject
Audiology
Speech Acoustics
050105 experimental psychology
Language and Linguistics
030507 speech-language pathology & audiology
03 medical and health sciences
Speech and Hearing
Phonetics
Perception
Vowel
medicine
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Perceptual categorization
Language
media_common
05 social sciences
American English
General Medicine
Formant
Child, Preschool
Vowel perception
Speech Perception
0305 other medical science
Psychology
Cross linguistic
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 17566053 and 00238309
- Volume :
- 64
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Language and Speech
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....3868ef22cc4e27c026d06df980eff384
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920943240