Effects of Language Experience on Organization of Vowel Sounds

There is a long tradition in laboratory phonetics of describing the interaction of phonetic inventories and constraints of auditory perception and articulatory production. For example, Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972) attempted to predict the inventories of typical vowel systems by appealing to the notion of maximal perceptual distinctiveness. Stevens (1989) explained the makeup of these inventories with reference to stable articulatory-acoustic mappings. This tradition is based on the notion that speech is a system which developed to provide robust, reliable and efficient communication. It is presumed that these desiderata have led to linguistic systems that take advantage of the operating principles of the perceptual and articulatory systems and that the structure of phonetic inventories (both supra-and sub-phonemic) will reflect, in some manner, these operating principles (see e. this approach). This is certainly a compelling story as far as it goes. However, it is also important that linguistic systems are learnable. Infants and second-language learners must be able to induce the phonetic inventory (and, of course, other aspects of language) to be competent participants in communication. The operating principles of whatever learning is responsible for the induction of phonetic inventories may also leave a fingerprint on the membership and structure of these inventories. Recent experimental work has been concerned with the description of processes underlying acquisition of phonetic categories. This paper will discuss