Phonetic richness can outweigh prosodically-driven phonological knowledge when learning words in an artificial language
- Authors
- Kim, Sahyang; Cho, Taehong; McQueen, James M.
- Issue Date
- May-2012
- Publisher
- ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
- Citation
- JOURNAL OF PHONETICS, v.40, no.3, pp.443 - 452
- Journal Title
- JOURNAL OF PHONETICS
- Volume
- 40
- Number
- 3
- Start Page
- 443
- End Page
- 452
- URI
- https://scholarworks.bwise.kr/hongik/handle/2020.sw.hongik/18964
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.wocn.2012.02.005
- ISSN
- 0095-4470
- Abstract
- How do Dutch and Korean listeners use acoustic-phonetic information when learning words in an artificial language? Dutch has a voiceless 'unaspirated' stop, produced with shortened Voice Onset Time (VOT) in prosodic strengthening environments (e.g., in domain-initial position and under prominence), enhancing the feature {-spread glottis}; Korean has a voiceless 'aspirated' stop produced with lengthened VOT in similar environments, enhancing the feature {+spread glottis}. Given this cross-linguistic difference, two competing hypotheses were tested. The phonological-superiority hypothesis predicts that Dutch and Korean listeners should utilize shortened and lengthened VOTs, respectively, as cues in artificial-language segmentation. The phonetic-superiority hypothesis predicts that both groups should take advantage of the phonetic richness of longer VOTs (i.e., their enhanced auditory-perceptual robustness). Dutch and Korean listeners learned the words of an artificial language better when word-initial stops had longer VOTs than when they had shorter VOTs. It appears that language-specific phonological knowledge can be overridden by phonetic richness in processing an unfamiliar language. Listeners nonetheless performed better when the stimuli were based on the speech of their native languages, suggesting that the use of richer phonetic information was modulated by listeners' familiarity with the stimuli. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Collections - College of Education > Department of English Education > 1. Journal Articles
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