title: The labial-coronal effect revisited: Japanese adults say pata, but hear tapa.
abstract: The labial-coronal effect has originally been described as a bias to initiate a word with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant (LC) sequence. This bias has been explained with constraints on the human speech production system, and its perceptual correlates have motivated the suggestion of a perception-production link. However, previous studies exclusively considered languages in which LC sequences are globally more frequent than their counterpart. The current study examined the LC bias in speakers of Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences. We first conducted an analysis of Japanese corpora that qualified this claim, and identified a subgroup of consonants (plosives) exhibiting a CL bias. Second, focusing on this subgroup of consonants, we found diverging results for production and perception such that Japanese speakers exhibited an articulatory LC bias, but a perceptual CL bias. The CL perceptual bias, however, was modulated by language of presentation, and was only present for stimuli recorded by a Japanese, but not a French, speaker. A further experiment with native speakers of French showed the opposite effect, with an LC bias for French stimuli only. Overall, we find support for a universal, articulatory motivated LC bias in production, supporting a motor explanation of the LC effect, while perceptual biases are influenced by distributional frequencies of the native language.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Sciences Institute, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako City, Saitama 351-0198, Japan. Sho.Tsuji@mpi.nl
authors.forename: Sho
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tsuji
authors.forename: Nayeli Gonzalez
authors.initials: NG
authors.lastname: Gomez
authors.forename: Victoria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Medina
authors.forename: Thierry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nazzi
authors.forename: Reiko
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mazuka
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D044466:Asian People; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009055:Mouth / Q000502:physiology; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013068:Speech Production Measurement