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.
Mielke
Jeff
J
Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA. miekle@ling.ohio-state.edu
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