Perceptual Acquisitions of Non-nat Native Listeners of

This study aimed to examine how native and non-native language experience affects the adults’ perception of nonnative contrasts. More specifically, this study examined the perceptual acquisition of English syllable structures and voicing contrasts by Japanese listeners. The results from thirty-four native listeners of Japanese showed that even the listeners with virtually no exposure to English speech could extract both onset and coda types of structure syllables from the stream of repeated syllables, and the good performance of non-native syllable structures is accounted by the listeners’ bias toward a ‘foreign’ category as well as the native phonology.