Phonological context as a cue to phonetic identity

By Jessica Maye, Robert Daland and Matthew Goldrick

In this talk we argue that one important cue that listeners use to identify a phonetic segment in speech is the phonological context that the segment occurs in. This is evident both in adult listeners and in infants who are still in the process of acquiring a native phonology. These facts suggest a phonological parsing system that relies on phonological as well as acoustic cues in establishing a phonological representation, both in development and throughout life.

A growing body of literature has demonstrated that phonological context affects adult listeners identification and discrimination of speech sounds (e.g., Massaro & Cohen, 1983; Pitt, 1998; Dupoux et al., 1999). The developmental literature tells a similar story. Infants begin to show the perceptual effects of the native language phonetic inventory around 9 months of age (e.g., Werker & Tees, 1984; Best, 1991; Kuhl et al., 2006). Conspicuously, around 9 months is also the age at which
they begin to show awareness of native language phonotactic constraints (Friederici & Wessels, 1993; Jusczyk et al., 1993; Mattys & Jusczyk, 2001). The developmental coincidence of these two aspects of phonological acquisition is predicted if phonetic categories and phonological regularities are two facets of a single phonological parsing system.

In this talk we will review the research demonstrating that phonological factors such as phonotactic constraints and allophony influence listeners perception of speech sounds and their ability to discriminate between acoustically similar phones. We will then present a computational model of phonological development that simultaneously learns the phones and the phonotactic constraints of a language, and will discuss how this sort of model can account for the effects of native
language phonology in phonetic identification and discrimination.