Perceiving through the Lens of Native Phonetics: Italian and Danish Listeners' Perception of English Consonant Contrasts

This study examined how the phonetic details of the phonological systems for two different nativelanguage listener groups interact with their perception of the phonetic details of three nonnative consonant contrasts. Current theoretical models of cross-language and second language speech perception are evaluated by relating native Italian and native Danish listeners’ perceptual assimilation of audio tokens of English /b v w ð/ 1 to how well the two groups discriminate the corresponding English contrasts /b/-/v/, /w/-/v/, and /ð/-/v/. Results indicate some support for the models, but also performance differences between the groups that are unexpected by any existing models. Implications for existing hypotheses about non-native speech perception are discussed.