14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Task and Stimulus Effects in the Perception of Short-Lag Thai Stops by Native Speakers Of English

Joseph Pater, Terrance Nearey, Wolf Wikeley

University of Alberta, Canada

This paper extends a previous study of the perceptual acquisition of Thai stop voicing by native speakers of English, which found that subjects performed better on contrasts in voicing lead than lag. This finding, surprising in light of earlier cross-linguistic VOT research, was attributed to properties of the task employed. The present study further investigated possible task effects by examining the discrimination and categorization of the same stimuli in various experimental conditions. Stimulus effects were also investigated by performing token-based analyses of the results, and by comparing them to acoustic properties of the tokens. The outcome of the discrimination experiment was the opposite of the earlier study, with significantly better performance on contrasts in voicing lag than lead. Interestingly, discrimination and categorization of the shortÐlag stops indicates that the alveolars are perceived as more "voiceless" than the labials, which is only partially reducible to VOT differences.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Pater, Joseph / Nearey, Terrance / Wikeley, Wolf (1999): "Task and stimulus effects in the perception of short-lag Thai stops by native speakers of English", In ICPhS-14, 121-124.