Publication ｜Sophia Linguistica
Tomohiko Ooigawa
In the present research, a discrimination test of English, French and Spanish liquids and an identification test of Spanish liquids were conducted with native speakers of Japanese. This paper reports the results of the two experiments and previous studies, and shows that PAM: Perceptual Assimilation Model (e.g., Best 1995, Best and Tyler 2007) accounts for the perception. In the first experiment, the Japanese listeners discriminated nearly perfectly the French liquid contrast, the Spanish lateral versus trill (/l/-/r/) contrast, and the Spanish tap versus trill (/ɾ/-/r/) contrast while they poorly discriminated the contrasts of the English liquids and the Spanish lateral versus tap (/l/-/ɾ/). In the second experiment, the majority of the Japanese listeners assimilated Spanish tap and lateral (/ɾ/ and /l/) to Japanese single /r/ while they assimilated Spanish trill /r/ to Japanese double /r/. According to the results of the present and previous studies, PAM accounts for the perception of English, French and Spanish liquids by Japanese naïve listeners.
