Phonotactic experience conditions speech perception

Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that native phonotactic constraints influence listeners’ perception of non-native speech. These studies typically show that speech which violates the phonotactic rules of the listener’s native language is often misperceived as speech that adheres to native phonotactics, behaviour which is often characterised as phonotactically conditioned perceptual repair. The present thesis extends these findings by examining the effects of language-specific listener expectation on non-native speech perception. The central hypothesis presented within is that sequences of speech that are unexpected by the listener are often misperceived as sequences that are expected. This sugges..