Differences in Glottal Stop Perception between English and Japanese Listeners

This study examines whether English L1 and Japanese L2 listeners differ in the way they perceive the glottal stop as a signal to a phonological contrast in English. Glottal stops are often used by native English speakers as an allophone of /t/, including intervocalic environments, while this variation is not found in Japanese. Thus, the different L1 experience of the listeners may cause differences in their perceptual sensitivity to the glottal stop for a lexical contrast in English. In this experiment synthetic continua were constructed between ‘bear’ [beə] and ‘better’ [beə] using acoustic dimensions of fundamental frequency, voicing amplitude and diplophonia. Identification task results showed English and Japanese listeners differed in terms of how they used the acoustic cues of the glottal gesture for the contrast. Interestingly, Japanese listeners were more sensitive to the amplitude dip than English listeners, suggesting they were more sensitive to the acoustic properties of the stimuli.