Effects of linguistic experience on perception and learnability of non-speech categories

The present study addresses whether linguistic experience affects the learnability of non-speech categories and in turn whether learning non-speech categories affects speech perception. Speakers of English and Spanish, languages that have different mappings between voice-onset-time (VOT) and their voicing categories, were trained to categorize a series of analogous non-speech (tone-onset-time) sounds into two groups. The boundaries between the distributions of toneonset-time (TOT) stimuli were either (1) consistent with the negative auditory discontinuity (–CC), (2) consistent with the positive auditory discontinuity (+CC), or (3) inconsistent both auditory discontinuities (IC), along the VOT/TOT dimension. Results suggest that linguistic experience does not play a role in the learnability of these non-speech categories. While language experience affects VOT category labeling boundaries, short-term experience with TOT categorization does not appear to influence VOT boundary locations. Speech and non-speech appear to be processed independently. The relationship between auditory discontinuities and learnability is discussed.