This study examines the perception of short and long vowels in Arabic and Japanese by three groups of listeners differing in their first languages (L1): Arabic, Japanese, and Persian. While Persian uses the same alphabet as Arabic and Iranian students learn Arabic in school, the two languages are typologically unrelated. Further, unlike Arabic or Japanese, vowel length may no longer be contrastive in modern Persian. In this study, a question of interest was whether Persian listeners’ foreign language learning experience or Japanese listeners’ L1 phonological experience might help them to accurately process short and long vowels in Arabic. In Experiment 1, Arabic and Japanese listeners were more accurate than Persian listeners in discriminating vowel length contrasts in their own L1 only. In Experiment 2, Arabic and Japanese listeners were more accurate than Persian listeners in identifying the length categories in the “other” unknown language as well as in their own L1. The difference in the listeners’ perceptual performance between the two experiments supports the view that long-term L1 representations may be invoked to a greater extent in the identification than discrimination test. The present results highlight the importance of selecting the appropriate test for assessing cross-language speech perception.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
February 2011
February 11 2011
The perception of Arabic and Japanese short and long vowels by native speakers of Arabic, Japanese, and Persian
Kimiko Tsukada
Kimiko Tsukada
a)
1Department of International Studies,
Macquarie University
, North Ryde New South Wales 2109, Australia
Search for other works by this author on:
a)
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Electronic mail: [email protected]
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 129, 989–998 (2011)
Article history
Received:
February 08 2010
Accepted:
November 17 2010
Citation
Kimiko Tsukada; The perception of Arabic and Japanese short and long vowels by native speakers of Arabic, Japanese, and Persian. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 February 2011; 129 (2): 989–998. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3531801
Download citation file:
Pay-Per-View Access
$40.00
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
Citing articles via
All we know about anechoic chambers
Michael Vorländer
A survey of sound source localization with deep learning methods
Pierre-Amaury Grumiaux, Srđan Kitić, et al.
Performance study of ray-based ocean acoustic tomography methods for estimating submesoscale variability in the upper ocean
Etienne Ollivier, Richard X. Touret, et al.
Related Content
Source characteristics of voiceless dorsal fricatives
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (July 2018)
Production and perception of Persian geminate stops at three speaking rates
J Acoust Soc Am (May 2004)
Perception of Persian uvular and velar stop consonants by speakers of American English
J Acoust Soc Am (August 2005)
An examination of the different ways that non-native phones may be perceptually assimilated as uncategorized
J Acoust Soc Am (January 2016)
Persian speakers of English: Acoustics of vowel epenthesis
J Acoust Soc Am (April 2015)