The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

18 May 2004

Christine Haunz


Language-specific and universal factors influencing perceived similarity

Perceived similarity may be influenced by different factors, which fall into two major groups; the first group are universal factors, which correlate with acoustic-phonetic characteristics, such as the availability of cues signalling sound contrasts, in specific positions and environments. These factors are expected to influence judgments of similarity cross-linguistically, as shown in Steriade (2001), who describes universal hierarchies of relative perceptibility. The second group of factors is concerned with the effects of the language-specific organization of the phoneme inventory and phonotactics on perception, which can be observed in the perceptual difficulties that language learners have with phonemes of a second language. An influence of native phonotactics on perception is contested by Silverman (1992), but supported by Dupoux et al. (1998). The latter view predicts that non-native speakers rate the similarity between forms that are illegal in their native language (L1) and those that they perceptually assimilate them to as significantly higher than listeners of a language in which both forms are legal.

To determine the relative influence of universal and specific factors, an experiment comparing the similarity of pairs of sound sequences as perceived by native speakers of English and Russian was conducted. Listeners rated the similarity of pairs of Russian pseudo-words differing word-initially in the following ways:

  1. C1C2 vs. C1@C2
  2. C1C2 vs. C1/2
  3. C1C2 vs. C1C3 / C4C2 (one feature change per comparison)
  4. C1@C2 vs. C1@C3 / C4@C2

Results showed evidence in favour of both sides. A number of findings suggest effects of universal perceptibility hierarchies: for example, a voicing change is more similar than a change in nasality for both groups. However, there is also support of the claim that language background is relevant, such as in a comparison of the ratings of cluster pairs and the corresponding epenthesised onset pairs (3 and 4): only Russian listeners showed the predicted lower similarity ratings for the case of two released consonants (4) and thus made use of the added acoustic cues. The findings suggest that there is a division of labour between the universal acoustic-phonetic and the language-specific factors, and that they interact to determine perceived similarity.

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