Perceiving Nonnative Vowels

The Effect of Context on Perception as Evidenced by Event-Related Brain Potentials

frenck{at}up.univ-aix.fr

In 2 experiments, the authors examined the electrophysiological auditory responses of monolingual French listeners to American English vowel contrasts as a function of the surrounding vowel context. The context was determined on the basis of behavioral results (C.Meunier, C. Frenck-Mestre, T. Lelekov-Boissard, & M. Le Besnaris, 2003, 2004). In the 1st experiment, where the vowel /I/ was placed in a context in which it could easily be discriminated from the surrounding vowels (82% /i/ and 3% /ae/), the electrophysiological response to this vowel showed both acoustic and phonemic responses in line with behavioral results. In the 2nd experiment, where the same vowel /I/ was placed in a difficult context (82% // and 3% /ae/), the electrophysiological response of French participants to this vowel revealed a greatly reduced phonemic response, showing assimilation of the vowel to the surrounding context, again in line with behavioral results. The results of a 3rd control experiment with American participants showed both an acoustic and a phonemic response to the vowel /I/ in the difficult context (82% // and 3% /ae/). This pattern demonstrates the fluctuations in perception as a function of context, and hints at a supple system that may be modified through experience.

KEY WORDS: vowel perception, event-related brain potentials, P300, nonnative vowels

Submitted on December 10, 2003
Revised on June 22, 2004
Accepted on March 20, 2005

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Facebook    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?