Discrimination of English and Thai words ending with voiceless stops by native Thai listeners differing in English experience

This study examines the discrimination of words ending with voiceless stops /p t k/ in first language (L1) and second language (L2) by three groups of native Thai participants. These participants differed in their countries of residence and experience with L2 English in the formal education system. The first group (T1) was a group of 18 Thai listeners who were living in Australia. The second and third groups consisted of 12 university students (T2) and 12 high-school students (T3) living in Thailand. Eighteen Australian English (AusE) listeners were included as controls. English and Thai words minimally contrasting in the final stop (e.g. ‘cap’ vs. ‘cat’) were presented to the listeners to investigate whether L2 phonetic learning occurs even for the contrasts that are expected to be discriminated with high accuracy from the onset of L2 learning and if so, how it is influenced by L2 experience. All three Thai groups showed reasonably accurate discrimination for both English and Thai words, but only T1 showed discrimination accuracy comparable to AusE in English. Further, only T3 was clearly more accurate in discriminating unreleased Thai than English stop contrasts, most of which were accompanied with release bursts. These two findings are taken to be evidence for phonetic learning of specific aspects of L2 contrasts rather than positive L1 transfer.

[1]  C. Best.  A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception , 1995 .

[2]  Barbara Hancin-Bhatt.  Optimality in second language phonology: codas in Thai ESL , 2000 .

[3]  P. Ladefoged.  A course in phonetics , 1975 .

[4]  James Emil Flege,et al.  Factors affecting degree of foreign accent in an L2: a review , 2001, J. Phonetics.

[5]  Felicity Cox,et al.  The Acoustic Characteristics of /hVd/ Vowels in the Speech of some Australian Teenagers , 2006 .

[6]  Susan G. Guion,et al.  The Vowel Systems of Quichua-Spanish Bilinguals , 2003, Phonetica.

[7]  James Emil Flege,et al.  THE EFFECT OF EXPERIENCE ON ADULTS' ACQUISITION OF A SECOND LANGUAGE , 2001, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[8]  Lydia K. H. So,et al.  An acoustic analysis of unreleased stop consonants in word-final position , 1994, ICSLP.

[9]  G. L. Trager,et al.  Linguistics across cultures , 1957 .

[10]  Felicity Cox,et al.  Australian English pronunciation into the 21st century , 2006 .

[11]  S. Oyama.  A sensitive period for the acquisition of a nonnative phonological system , 1976 .

[12]  Arthur S. Abramson,et al.  Illustrations of the IPA: Thai , 1993 .

[13]  David Birdsong,et al.  Release Bursts in English Word-Final Voiceless Stops Produced by Native English and Korean Adults and Children , 2004, Phonetica.

[14]  N I Durlach,et al.  Speaking clearly for the hard of hearing I: Intelligibility differences between clear and conversational speech. , 1985, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[15]  Ratree Wayland,et al.  Training English and Chinese Listeners to Perceive Thai Tones: A Preliminary Report , 2004 .

[16]  D Byrd,et al.  Preliminary results on speaker-dependent variation in the TIMIT database. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[17]  J. Flege,et al.  An investigation of current models of second language speech perception: the case of Japanese adults' perception of English consonants. , 2000, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[18]  Ratree Wayland,et al.  Perceptual discrimination of Thai tones by naive and experienced learners of Thai , 2003, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[19]  Tessa Bent,et al.  The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit. , 2003, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[20]  F. Parker,et al.  Voicing cues as a function of the tense/lax distinction in vowels , 1981 .

[21]  J. Flege.  The production of "new" and "similar" phones in a foreign language: evidence for the effect of equivalence classification , 1987 .

[22]  Gail Levy-Berger,et al.  Human Experimental Psychology , 1985 .

[23]  K. Tsukada.  Cross-language perception of word-final stops in Thai and English , 2006 .

[24]  Arthur S. Abramson,et al.  Thai Final Stops: Cross-Language Perception , 1999, Phonetica.

[25]  Arthur S. Abramsont.  The Stability of Distinctive Vowel Lengthin Thai , 1993 .

[26]  J. Flege,et al.  Effects of experience on non-native speakers' production and perception of English vowels , 1997 .

[27]  Zinny S. Bond,et al.  A note on the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of inadvertently clear speech , 1994, Speech Commun..

[28]  W S WANG.  Transition and release as perceptual cues for final plosives. , 1959, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[29]  Dani Byrd,et al.  Relations of sex and dialect to reduction , 1994, Speech Communication.

[30]  J. Flege.  Factors affecting degree of perceived foreign accent in English sentences. , 1988, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[31]  Tsuneo Yamada,et al.  Perceived phonetic dissimilarity and L2 speech learning: the case of Japanese /r/ and English /l/ and /r/ , 2004, J. Phonetics.

[32]  C. Fowler,et al.  Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English , 1997 .

[33]  I. R. MacKay,et al.  PERCEIVING VOWELS IN A SECOND LANGUAGE , 2004, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[34]  James Emil Flege,et al.  The effect of L1 use on pronunciation in Quichua-Spanish bilinguals , 2000, J. Phonetics.

[35]  J Harrington,et al.  Acoustic evidence for dynamic formant trajectories in Australian English vowels. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[36]  David Birdsong,et al.  Degree of foreign accent in English sentences produced by Korean children and adults , 2006, J. Phonetics.

[37]  William L. Martens,et al.  Identification of English voiceless fricatives by Japanese listeners: The influence of vowel context on sensitivity and response bias , 2001 .

[38]  J. Harrington,et al.  An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels* , 1997 .

[39]  I. R. MacKay,et al.  Category restructuring during second-language speech acquisition. , 2001, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[40]  W. Strange.  Speech perception and linguistic experience : issues in cross-language research , 1995 .

[41]  W. Strange,et al.  Effects of phonological and phonetic factors on cross-language perception of approximants , 1992 .

[42]  E. Fava,et al.  A METHOD FOR ASSESSING THE PERCEPTION OF VOWELS IN A SECOND LANGUAGE , 2006 .

[43]  Mirjam Broersma,et al.  Perception of familiar contrasts in unfamiliar positions. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[44]  Andre Malecot,et al.  The Role of Releases in the Identification of Released Final Stops: A Series of Tape-Cutting Experiments , 1958 .

[45]  Taehong Cho,et al.  Phonological versus phonetic cues in native and non-native listening: Korean and Dutch listeners' perception of Dutch and English consonants. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[46]  Arthur S. Abramson,et al.  Distinctive vowel length: duration vs. spectrum in Thai , 1990 .

[47]  T. Crystal,et al.  Segmental durations in connected‐speech signals: Current results , 1988 .

[48]  K. Tsukada.  Cross-language perception of final stops in Thai and English : a comparison of native and non-native listeners , 2004 .

[49]  David Birdsong,et al.  A developmental study of English vowel production and perception by native Korean adults and children , 2005, J. Phonetics.

[50]  J. Flege,et al.  Talker and listener effects on degree of perceived foreign accent. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[51]  Arthur S. Abramson,et al.  Essays in Tai linguistics , 2001 .

[52]  Jean‐Pierre A. Radley,et al.  Acoustic Properties of Stop Consonants , 1957 .

[53]  G. Cochrane.  Some Vowel Durations in Australian English , 1970 .

[54]  Michael Kenstowicz,et al.  Issues in loanword adaptation: A case study from Thai , 2006 .

[55]  L. Lisker.  Perceiving Final Voiceless Stops without Release: Effects of Preceding Monophthongs versus Nonmonophthongs , 1999, Phonetica.

[56]  I. R. MacKay,et al.  Native Italian speakers' perception and production of English vowels. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[57]  V. Mann,et al.  Lexical familiarity and English-language experience affect Japanese adults' perception of / / and /l/. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[58]  A. G. Mitchell,et al.  The pronunciation of English in Australia , 1946 .

[59]  M. Picheny,et al.  Speaking clearly for the hard of hearing. II: Acoustic characteristics of clear and conversational speech. , 1986, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[60]  Pierre A. Hallé,et al.  Phonetic vs. phonological influences on French listeners' perception of American English approximants , 1999 .