We Have a New Site!
With the help of your donations we have been making good progress on designing and launching our new website! Check it out at https://linguistlist.org/!***We are still in our beta stages for the new site--if you have any feedback, be sure to let us know at webdevlinguistlist.org***
Academic Paper |
|
|
|
|
| Title: | Effect of voicing on perceptual auditory laterality in Estonian and Norwegian native speakers |
| Author: | René Westerhausen |
| Author: | Nele Põldver |
| Author: | Richard Naar |
| Author: | Dominika Radziun |
| Author: | Maria Kaarep |
| Author: | Kairi Kreegipuu |
| Author: | Kenneth Hugdahl |
| Author: | Pärtel Lippus |
| Author: | Kristiina Kompus |
| Linguistic Field: | Psycholinguistics |
| Subject Language: |
Estonian
Norwegian Nynorsk |
| Abstract: | As a reliable and valid measures of perceptual auditory laterality, dichotic listening has been successfully applied in studies in many countries and languages. However, languages differ in the linguistic relevance of change in initial phoneme of words (e.g., for word identification). In the present cross-language study, we examine the effect of these differences on dichotic-listening task performance to establish how characteristics of one's native language affect the perception of nonnative phonological features. We compared 33 native speakers of Norwegian, a language characterized by a clear distinction between voiced and unvoiced initial plosive consonants, with 30 native speakers of Estonian, a language that has exclusively unvoiced initial phonemes. Using a free-report dichotic-listening paradigm utilizing pairs of voiced (/ba/, /da/, /ga/) and unvoiced (/pa/, /ta/, /ka/) stop-consonant vowels as stimulus material, the Norwegian native speakers were found to be more sensitive to the voicing of the initial plosive than the Estonian group. “Voicing” explained 69% and 18% of the variance in the perceptual auditory laterality in the Norwegian and the Estonian sample, respectively. This indicates that experiential differences, likely during acquisition of the mother tongue in early development, permanently shape the sensitivity to the voicing contrast. |
|
|
|
|
This article appears IN Applied Psycholinguistics Vol. 39, Issue 2, which you can READ on Cambridge's site . View the full article for free in the current issue ofCambridge Extra Magazine! |
|
Add a new paper
Return to Academic Papers main page Return to Directory of Linguists main page |
|


