Language Specific Compensation for Coarticulation

This paper reports an experiment testing whether compensation for coarticulation in speech perception is mediated by linguistic experience. The stimuli are a set of fricative-vowel syllables on continua from [s] to [∫] with the vowels [a], [u], and [y]. Responses from native speakers of English and French (20 in each group) were compared. Native speakers of French are familiar with the production of the rounded vowel [y] while this vowel was unfamiliar to the native English speakers. Both groups showed compensation for coarticulation (both t > 5, p < 0.01) with the vowel [u] (more “s” responses indicating that in the context of a round vowel, fricatives with a lower spectral center of gravity were labeled “s”). The French group also showed a compensation effect in the [y] environment (t[20] = 3.48, p<0.01). English listeners also showed a tendency for more subject-to-subject variation on the [y] boundary locations than did the French listeners (Levene's test of equality of variance, p < 0.1). The results thus indicate that compensation for coarticulation is a language specific effect, tied to the listener's experience with the conditioning phonetic environment.