Conference Talks
PIRE fellows Angelica Brill and Emily Herman present poster at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America.
Spanish speakers often produce English words with initial /s/-consonant clusters with an initial [e], e.g. school as [esku:l]. This has been linked to the perception of an illusory [e] preceding acoustic [sC] sequences, but there is evidence that exposure to English can weaken this illusion, raising the possibility that late Spanish-English bilinguals can learn to distinguish tokens like eschool from school, but they map both to the target word. Lexical decision and auditory discrimination experiments confirmed this hypothesis. Late Spanish-English bilinguals accepted both pronunciations readily (from either native- or Spanish-accented talkers), but they also discriminated them easily.
Citation: Carlson, M. T., Brill, A., Herman, E., & Olmstead, A. (2022, January). Can you un-hear that?: Phonotactics and the lexicon in Spanish-English bilinguals’ perception of English words. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.
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.