Cross-language speech perception of final stops by Australian- English, Japanese and Thai listeners

This study examined the discrimination of word-final stop contrasts (/p/-/t/, /p/-/k/, /t/-/k/) in English and Thai by three groups of listeners differing in their first language (L1): Australian English (AE), Japanese (NJ) and Thai (NT). Thai final stops are invariably unreleased whereas English final stops are variably released. Although Japanese listeners had no experience with word-final stops in the L1, they were able to discriminate English (but not Thai) contrasts accurately, demonstrating that non-native contrasts are learnable and that some aspects of speech perception remain plastic beyond early childhood. The AE listeners did not match the NT listeners in discriminating Thai stops despite their experience with unreleased stops in the L1. This suggests that phonetic realization of sounds and/or the amount of acoustic information in the speech signal may influence accuracy with which non-native contrasts are discriminated.