Native-language phonetic and phonological influences on perception of American English approximants by Danish and German listeners

Perception of non-native consonant contrasts may be influenced by phonetic, as well as phonological, properties of the listener’s native language. The impact of both factors on perception of American English /r l w j/ was investigated with native speakers of Danish and German, which have /r l j/ but lack /w/, thus employing /r/-/l/ but lacking /w/-/j/ and /w/-/r/ as phonological contrasts. However, while the three languages realize /j/ identically, Danish/German ‘‘light’’ alveolar [l] differs modestly from English ‘‘dark’’ [ ł] (velarized), Danish pharyngeal and labiodental approximant realizations of/r, v/ are more similar to English /r, w/than are German uvular and labiodentals fricative realizations, and Danish is richer in approximants than English or German. Phonetic similarities perceptually outweighed phonological correspondences: Danish listeners’ performance on /w/-/r/ and /r//l/ approached that of English speakers, and discrimination of /w/-/j/ was remarkably higher than English speakers’, all largely irrespective of spoken English experience. German listeners’ identification of all contrasts was highly categorical, but discrimination was poorer than English and Danish listeners’ for /w/-/r/ and /r/-/l/ and fell in between those two groups for /w/-/j/. Thus, cross-language phonetic relationships among corresponding (or neighboring) phonemes strongly influence perception. Together with systemic consideration of English, Danish, and German vowel and approximant subsystems, our results indicate that non-native speech perception is affected not only by the phonological contrastiveness and phonetic realizations of the target phonemes in the listeners’ language, but also by broader systemic factors such as phonological subclasses.