Iverson Paul, Ekanayake Dulika, Hamann Silke, Sennema Anke, Evans Bronwen G
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2008 Oct;34(5):1305-16. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.34.5.1305.
The present study investigated the perception and production of English /w/ and /v/ by native speakers of Sinhala, German, and Dutch, with the aim of examining how their native language phonetic processing affected the acquisition of these phonemes. Subjects performed a battery of tests that assessed their identification accuracy for natural recordings, their degree of spoken accent, their relative use of place and manner cues, the assimilation of these phonemes into native-language categories, and their perceptual maps (i.e., multidimensional scaling solutions) for these phonemes. Most Sinhala speakers had near-chance identification accuracy, Germans ranged from chance to 100% correct, and Dutch speakers had uniformly high accuracy. The results suggest that these learning differences were caused more by perceptual interference than by category assimilation; Sinhala and German speakers both have a single native-language phoneme that is similar to English /w/ and /v/, but the auditory sensitivities of Sinhala speakers make it harder for them to discern the acoustic cues that are critical to /w/-/v/ categorization.
本研究调查了僧伽罗语、德语和荷兰语母语者对英语/w/和/v/的感知与发音，旨在考察他们的母语语音处理如何影响这些音素的习得。受试者进行了一系列测试，评估他们对自然录音的识别准确率、口语口音程度、对发音部位和方式线索的相对使用情况、这些音素向母语类别中的同化，以及他们对这些音素的感知地图（即多维标度解）。大多数僧伽罗语母语者的识别准确率接近随机水平，德语母语者的准确率从随机到100%正确不等，而荷兰语母语者的准确率一直很高。结果表明，这些学习差异更多是由感知干扰而非类别同化造成的；僧伽罗语和德语母语者都有一个与英语/w/和/v/相似的单一母语音素，但僧伽罗语母语者的听觉敏感度使他们更难辨别对/w/-/v/分类至关重要的声学线索。
