title: The role of abstraction in non-native speech perception.
abstract: The end-result of perceptual reorganization in infancy is currently viewed as a reconfigured perceptual space, "warped" around native-language phonetic categories, which then acts as a direct perceptual filter on any non-native sounds: naïve-listener discrimination of non-native-sounds is determined by their mapping onto native-language phonetic categories that are acoustically/articulatorily most similar. We report results that suggest another factor in non-native speech perception: some perceptual sensitivities cannot be attributed to listeners' warped perceptual space alone, but rather to enhanced general sensitivity along phonetic dimensions that the listeners' native language employs to distinguish between categories. Specifically, we show that the knowledge of a language with short and longvowelcategories leads to enhanced discrimination of non-nativeconsonantlength contrasts. We argue that these results support a view of perceptual reorganization as the consequence of learners' hierarchical inductive inferences about the structure of the language's sound system: infants not only acquire the specific phonetic category inventory, but also draw higher-order generalizations over the set of those categories, such as the overall informativity of phonetic dimensions for sound categorization. Non-native sound perception is then also determined by sensitivities that emerge from these generalizations, rather than only by mappings of non-native sounds onto native-language phonetic categories.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0108, USA.
authors.forename: Bozena
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Pajak
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093-0108, USA.
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Levy
keywords: Non-native speech perception; cross-linguistic influence; inductive inference; naïve listeners; perceptual reorganization; sound discrimination