Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A1100, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2012 Sep;132(3):EL189-95. doi: 10.1121/1.4742318.
Thresholds of formant discrimination of speech and non-speech sounds were compared for native listeners of English and Chinese. English listeners showed significantly better thresholds than Chinese listeners, not only for English vowels, but also for Chinese vowels. Thresholds for vowel-spectrum-shaped noise were comparable for the two groups. These results suggest that English listeners are more sensitive to formant frequency changes of vowel stimuli than Chinese listeners, possibly due to the denser vowel space for English than for Mandarin Chinese. However, the psychophysical capacity to discriminate formant frequency changes in non-speech sounds is similar for English and Chinese listeners.
本研究对比了英语母语者和汉语母语者对语音和非语音声音的共振峰辨别阈限。结果表明，英语母语者的辨别阈限显著低于汉语母语者，不仅在英语元音上如此，在汉语元音上也是如此。而两组被试者对元音频谱噪声的辨别阈限则无显著差异。这些结果表明，英语母语者对于元音刺激的共振峰频率变化更为敏感，这可能是由于英语的元音空间比汉语更为密集。然而，英语母语者和汉语母语者在辨别非语音声音的共振峰频率变化方面的心理物理能力是相似的。
