Alexander L. Francis
Purdue University
4PM, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006
Lucy Ellis Lounge
As linguists, we are used to talking about phonemes. Historically, we say that Old High German /p/ becomes /f/ in modern German. Developmentally, children are said to learn to differentiate /s/ from /S/. Cross-linguistically, we say that native Japanese speakers have difficulty distinguishing /r/ from /l/. However, considered acoustically, phonemes, phonetic categories, and even phonetic "features" such as [± tense] are not atomic units, but rather represent collocations of potentially independent acoustic properties. In this talk I will discuss research, both from my lab and elsewhere, that suggests that phonetic experience affects listeners' distribution of attention to these sub-phonemic properties, and that, in some ways, these properties matter more than categories for understanding perceptual learning of speech. I will conclude with a brief speculation on the relevance of such a claim for linguists.