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Individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts

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Abstract

How could individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence their cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts? The present study investigated this question by testing forty L1 Chinese-L2 English listeners with two tasks: one for testing the listeners’ sensitivity to pitch and temporal information of non-speech acoustic signals; the other for testing their cue weighting (VOT, F0) strategies for distinguishing voicing contrasts in English stop consonants. The results showed that the more sensitive the listeners were to temporal differences of non-speech acoustic signals, the more they relied on VOT to differentiate between the voicing contrasts in English stop consonants. No such association was found between listeners’ differences in sensitivity to pitch changes of non-speech acoustic signals and their reliance on F0 to cue the voicing contrasts. The results could shed light on the different processing mechanisms for pitch and temporal information of acoustic signals.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mr Jixian Nie for his help with data collection.

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China (No. 10400-120215-10711).

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  1. Department of English, East China Normal University, 200241, Shanghai, China

    Xiaoluan Liu

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  1. Xiaoluan Liu
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Correspondence to Xiaoluan Liu.

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This work was approved by the Committee on Research Ethics at East China Normal University. Informed consent was obtained from all human participants for this work.

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Liu, X. Individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts. J Psycholinguist Res 51, 903–916 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09869-5

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