Perception of vowel and consonant quantity contrasts by Cantonese, English, French, and Japanese speakers

This paper reports on the findings of a study which investigated Cantonese, Japanese, English and French listeners’ ability to perceive non-native quantity contrasts. In these languages, duration is used to mark phonemic quantity contrasts to different degrees. We had native listeners of these languages listen to resynthesized Estonian nonce word stimuli in AXB discrimination and identification tasks. The stimuli contrasted in consonant and vowel quantity. The results showed that Japanese listeners, who have short vs. long contrasts in both vowels and consonants, outperformed the other listeners in discrimination and identification. However, their identification accuracy for overlong Estonian vowels and consonants was not as high as that for long Estonian vowels and consonants. Meanwhile, French listeners, who have no quantity contrasts in their L1 phonology, did not perform worse than the other groups. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2023 Guarant International.