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Abstract:
Listeners can flexibly retune category boundaries of their native language
to adapt to non-canonically produced phonemes. This only occurs, however,
if the pronunciation peculiarities can be attributed to stable and not transient
speaker-specific characteristics. Listening to someone speaking a second language,
listeners could attribute non-canonical pronunciations either to the
speaker or to the fact that she is modifying her categories in the second language.
We investigated whether, following exposure to Dutch-accented English,
Dutch listeners show effects of category retuning during test where they
hear the same speaker speaking her native language, Dutch. Exposure was a
lexical-decision task where either word-final [f] or [s] was replaced by an
ambiguous sound. At test listeners categorized minimal word pairs ending in
sounds along an [f]-[s] continuum. Following exposure to English words,
Dutch listeners showed boundary shifts of a similar magnitude as following
exposure to the same phoneme variants in their native language. This suggests
that production patterns in a second language are deemed a stable characteristic.
A second experiment suggests that category retuning also occurs
when listeners are exposed to and tested with a native speaker of their second
language. Listeners thus retune phoneme boundaries across languages.
