The interplay of speech perception and phonology: experimental evidence from Turkish.
This study supports claims of a relationship between speech perception and phonology with evidence from a crosslinguistic perception experiment involving /h/ deletion in Turkish. Turkish /h/ is often deleted in fast speech, but only in a specific set of segmental contexts which defy traditional explanation. It is shown that /h/ deletes in environments where lower perceptibility is predicted. The results of the perception experiment verify these predictions and further show that language background has a significant impact on speech perception. Finally, this perceptual account of Turkish /h/ deletion points to an empirical means of testing the conflicting hypotheses that perception is active in the synchronic grammar or that its influence is limited to diachrony.
Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA. miekle@ling.ohio-state.edu
Jeff
J
Mielke
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014421:Turkey