Perceiving through the lens of native phonetics: Italian and Danish listener's perception of English consonant contrasts.

This study examined how the phonetic details of the phonological systems for two different native-language listener groups interact with their perception of the phonetic details of three non-native consonant contrasts. Current theoretical models of cross-language and second language speech perception are evaluated by relating native Italian and native Danish listeners' perceptual assimilation of audio tokens of English /b v w ð/1 to how well the two groups discriminate the corresponding English contrasts /b/-/v/, /w/-/v/, and /ð/-/v/. Results indicate some support for the models, but also performance differences between the groups that are unexpected by any existing models. Implications for existing hypotheses about non-native speech perception are discussed.