The perception of vowelless words in Tashlhiyt

Résumé En

This study examines the perceptual mechanisms involved in the processing of words without vowels, a lexical form that is common in Tashlhiyt but highly dispreferred cross-linguistically. In Experiment 1, native and naive (English-speaking) listeners completed a paired discrimination task where the middle segment of the different-pair contained either a different vowel (e.g., fan vs. fin), consonant (e.g., ʁbr vs. ʁdr), or vowelless vs. voweled contrast (e.g., tlf vs. tuf). Experiment 2 was a wordlikeness ratings task of Tashlhiyt-like tri-segmental nonwords constructed to vary in the sonority of the middle segment. We find that vowelless words containing different types of sonority profiles are generally discriminable by both native and naive listeners. This can be explained by the phonetic and acoustic properties of vowelless words: Since Tashlhiyt exhibits low consonant-to-consonant coarticulation, the presence of robust consonantal cues in the speech signal means that the internal phonological structure of vowelless words is recoverable by listeners. Moreover, speech style variation provides further evidence that the phonetic implementation of vowelless words makes them perceptually stable. At the same time, wordlikeness ratings of nonwords indicate that listeners rely on their native-language experience to process the wellformedness of new words: Tashlhiyt listeners accept sonorant- and obstruent-centered vowelless words equally; meanwhile, English listeners’ preferences increase with higher sonority values of the word center. Thus, our findings provide an overview of the low-level acoustic-phonetic and higher-level phonological processing mechanisms involved in the perception of vowelless words. Our results can inform understandings of the relationship between language-specific phonetic variation and phonotactic patterns, as well as how auditory processing mechanisms shape phonological typology.