PIRE fellows Emily Herman and Angelica Brill present poster at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America.
Spanish speakers perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences, related to a productive loanword adaptation process, e.g. escáner from English scanner. We tracked the emergence of this illusion in 4IAX auditory discrimination. Native speakers heard initial portions of Spanish-like nonce words, e.g. estipa/astipa/stipa. The perceptual illusion was expected to hinder discrimination of pairs like estipa-stipa. For these pairs, when stimuli were truncated after the stop burst following the [s], discrimination was near ceiling although the burst confirmed the conditioning environment for the illusion. Accuracy dropped when longer portions were presented (e.g. esti-sti). The illusion is thus linguistic, not auditory.
Citation: Herman, E., Carlson, M. T., Brill, A., & Olmstead, A. (2022, January). Tracking illusory vowel effects through auditory and phonetic representations. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.