title: Missing phonemes are perceptually restored but differently by native and non-native listeners.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science and Technology, Sophia University, 7-1, Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 102-8554 Japan.
authors.forename: Mako
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ishida
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Science and Technology, Sophia University, 7-1, Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 102-8554 Japan.
authors.forename: Takayuki
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Arai
keywords: Bottom-up processing; L1 listening; L2 listening; Perceptual restoration; Phonemic restoration; Robustness; Speech perception; Top-down processing