Perception of Vowel and Consonant Quantity Contrasts by Cantonese, English, French, and Japanese Listeners

This study investigated Japanese, Cantonese, English, and French listeners’ ability to perceive non-native quantity contrasts (e.g., short vs. long). In these languages, duration is used to mark phonemic quantity contrasts to different degrees. We had native listeners of these four languages listen to resynthesized pseudo-Japanese and pseudo-Estonian stimuli in AXB and identification tasks. The stimuli contrasted in consonant and vowel quantity. The results showed that while Japanese listeners, who have systematic phonemic quantity contrasts in their L1, generally outperformed other listeners in identification and in discrimination, 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 as predicted. Our findings show that the role of duration in L1 phonology alone is not enough to predict the perception accuracy of non-native quantity contrasts when duration is the only acoustic cue.