The Perception of English Stops by Speakers of English,Spanish. Hungarian,and Thai: A Tape-Cutting Experiment

Abstract

American English stops, including residual stops,i.e., stops in /s/-clusters after the removal of the /s/, were presented in front of stressed vowels for identification on the one hand to native speakers of American English, on the other, to native speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish, Hungarian, and Thai, languages with differences in the phonetic composition of their stop phonemes. Speakers of American English identified the residual stops with the voiced (lenis) stop; the others, with the voiceless stop. The results suggest that there is a hierarchic organization among the features of these stops: the lack of aspiration tends to force the evaluation of stops in the direction of /b, d, g/ in American English, whereas in the languages where other distinctions exist, the evaluation is different.