WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students.
The Faculty of English invites everyone to a lecture on Perceived phonological overlap and the discrimination of non-native phones by Prof. Michael D. Tyler from the School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Australia.
The lecture will take place on June 21, 2018, at 6:30 p.m. in room C1, Collegium Novum.
When encountering consonants and vowels (or phones) in a foreign language for the first time, sensitivity to phonological contrast in the native language has a strong influence on how well they can be discriminated from each other. A pair of non-native phones can be difficult to discriminate if both are perceived as the same native phonological category (e.g., Polish sz /ʂ/ and ś /ɕ/ may both sound like sh /ʃ/ to English ears), but if each one is perceived as a different native phonological category then discrimination is usually excellent (e.g., sz /ʂ/ and s /s/ should sound like English sh /ʃ/ and s /s/, respectively). This general pattern has been confirmed across many different studies. However, there has been relatively little attention on uncategorised non-native phones, that is, those that are not perceived as consistent with any single non-native category. In this talk, I will report on recent research investigating the different ways in which uncategorised non-native phones might be perceptually assimilated to the native phonological system. Our results show that the native-language phonology can influence discrimination of non-native phones even when they are uncategorised. The degree of discriminability depends on whether the non-native phones overlap with the same or different sets of native phonological categories. I will discuss the implications of these findings for the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM; Best, 1995) and its extension to second-language speech learning, PAM-L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007).
Michael D. Tyler is an Associate Professor at Western Sydney University, Australia, where he holds a teaching and research position in Psychology. His main research foci are on the role of experience with the native language on shaping the perception of speech, and on testing and further developing the predictions of the highly influential Perceptual Assimilation Model for Second Language Speech Learning (PAM-L2), which he developed alongside his long-time collaborator, Prof. Catherine Best. With his students and collaborators, Associate Professor Tyler also investigates word segmentation in infants and adults, the development of speech perception in infants and toddlers, and the effects of bilingualism on cognition.
