Phonemic and phonetic factors in adult cross-language speech perception

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Abstract
Young infants can discriminate speech sounds across phonetic boundaries regardless of specific relevant experience; there is a modification in this ability during ontogeny such that adults often have difficulty discriminating phonetic contrasts which are not used contrastively in their native language. Humans may be endowed with innate auditory sensitivities which enable them to discriminate speech sounds according to universal phonetic boundaries and there may be a decline or loss in this ability after being exposed to a language which contrasts only a subset of those distinctions. Whether this modification represents a loss of sensorineural response capabilities or whether it shows a shift in attentional focus and/or processing strategies was investigated. In experiment 1, adult English-speaking subjects were tested on their ability to discriminate 2 non-English speech contrasts in a category-change discrimination task after first being predisposed to adopt 1 of 4 perceptual sets. In experiments 2, 3, and 4 subjects were tested in an AX (same/different) procedure, and the effects of both limited training and duration of the interstimulus interval were assessed. Results suggest that the previously observed ontogenetic modification in the perception of non-native phonetic contrasts involves a change in processing strategies rather than a sensorineural loss. Adult listeners can discriminate sounds across non-native phonetic categories in some testing conditions, but are not able to use that ability in testing conditions which have demands similar to those required in natural language processing.

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