The perceptual basis of the feature vowel height

The present study investigated whether listeners perceptually map phonetic information to phonological feature categories or to phonemes. The test case is a phonological feature that occurs in most of the world’s languages, namely vowel height, and its acoustic correlate, the first formant (F1). We first simulated vowel discrimination in virtual listeners who perceive speech sounds through phonological features and virtual listeners who perceive through phonemes. The simulations revealed that feature listeners differed from phoneme listeners in their perceptual discrimination of F1 along a front-back boundary continuum as compared to a front (or back) continuum. The competing predictions of phoneme-based versus feature-based vowel discrimination were explicitly tested in real human listeners. The real listeners’ vowel discrimination did not resemble the simulated phoneme listeners, and was compatible with that of the simulated feature listeners. The findings suggest that humans perceive vowel F1 through phonological feature categories like /high/ and /mid/.