Missing phonemes are perceptually restored but differently by native and non-native listeners

• Published in: SpringerPlus 2016-06, Vol.5 (1), p.713-713, Article 713
• Main Authors: Ishida, Mako, Arai, Takayuki
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Behavioural Science; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Philosophy and Cognitive Science; Pragmatics; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2193-1801; 2193-1801
• DOI: 10.1186/s40064-016-2479-8

This study investigates how similarly present and absent English phonemes behind noise are perceived by native and non-native speakers. Participants were English native speakers and Japanese native speakers who spoke English as a second language. They listened to English words and non-words in which a phoneme was covered by noise (added; phoneme + noise) or replaced by noise (replaced; noise only). The target phoneme was either a nasal (/m/ and /n/) or a liquid (/l/ and /r/). In experiment, participants listened to a pair of a word (or non-word) with noise (added or replaced) and a word (or non-word) without noise (original) in a row, and evaluated the similarity of the two on an eight-point scale (8: very similar, 1: not similar). The results suggested that both native and non-native speakers perceived the ‘added’ phoneme more similar to the original sound than the ‘replaced’ phoneme to the original sound. In addition, both native and non-native speakers restored missing nasals more than missing liquids. In general, a replaced phoneme was better restored in words than non-words by native speakers, but equally restored by non-native speakers. It seems that bottom-up acoustic cues and top-down lexical cues are adopted differently in the phonemic restoration of native and non-native speakers.