Perceptual and acoustical similarity of six European languages
Verna B. Stockmal, Z. S. Bond · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2001
Listeners have shown considerable sensitivity to the ‘‘acoustic signature’’ or ‘‘sound’’ of languages when discriminating or identifying unknown foreign languages. Which acoustic/phonetic properties of languages listeners employ when making these judgments are only imperfectly understood. Bond and Stockmal [Acoust. Soc. of Am. Berlin (1999)] found that initially, listeners made judgments about Asian languages based on regional characteristics, what might be termed voice setting [J. Esling and R. Wong, TESOL Q. 17, 89–95 (1983)], rather than by rhythmic properties. Perceptual focus shifted and rhythm became more salient when the set of languages shared regional characteristics. At least some of the rhythmic properties of languages can be extracted by phonetic measurements of the acoustic signal [F. Ramus, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler, Cognition 73, 265–292 (1999)]. This study presents instrumental measurements based on consonant/vowel segmentation of six European languages, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian. The acoustical measurements were used to plot the relationship of the languages to one another. Listeners were asked to judge similarity of spoken samples of the languages and to indicate which salient feature of the language was the basis for each judgment. Comparison of the perceptual judgments and instrumental measurements was made.