%0 Journal Article
%@ 1868-6354
%A Kogan, Vita V
%A Mora, Joan C
%D 2022
%F discovery:10157599
%I Open Library of the Humanities
%J Laboratory Phonology
%K speech perception, second language acquisition, category compactness
%N 1
%T The effects of individual differences in native perception on discrimination of a novel non-native contrast
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10157599/
%V 24
%X Native (L1) phonetic categories can constrain the perception of non-native contrasts which deviate from the listener’s L1 (Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege, 1995). Yet, some individuals are remarkably successful at accurately perceiving non-native sounds (e.g., Bongaerts, van Summeren, Planken, & Schils, 1997). We hypothesize that compact L1 categories give an initial advantage in distinguishing non-native contrasts. Sixty-eight Spanish monolinguals were tested on the degree of compactness of their native category /i/, measured through a goodness-of-fit rating task. Participants listened to synthesized variants of the Spanish /i/ vowel (differing in F1, F2, or both) and rated them as either good or bad exemplars of their representation of this category. An individual /i/ compactness index was calculated for each participant and related to the individual perceived dissimilarity score for the novel Russian contrast /i – ɨ/. The Russian contrast /i – ɨ/ is a problematic contrast to perceive for Spanish speakers due to the absence of /ɨ/ in the Spanish vowel inventory, a sound acoustically very similar to /i/. In this study, the compactness of the L1 category /i/ weakly predicted perceptual sensitivity (dissimilarity scores) for the Russian contrast /i – ɨ/.
%Z © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative  Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction  in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.