Perception of the moraic obstruent /Q/: a cross-linguistic study

Abstract

Item does not contain fulltextJapanese natives segment speech into morae. The current study tested whether this extends to perception of geminate consonants. We hypothesized that Japanese natives rely on the moraic obstruent /Q/ that is represented as a silent duration when perceiving geminate consonants. If so, it should be more difficult for them to distinguish ‘geminate fricative consonants /ss/’ and ‘a silent duration plus singleton fricative consonant /_s/’. Two series of cross-linguistic experiments with Japanese and Dutch natives compared discrimination and categorization accuracy of pseudo words including /ss/ and /_s/. Japanese natives discriminated them well while they poorly categorized them. Dutch natives performed both tasks with regard to /_s/ relatively well. These result patterns support our hypothesis. This provides further support for the language specific listening