Perception of Tashlhiyt consonant quantity contrast by native vs. nonnative listeners from three languages

Licence: icphs2023.org International audience Remarkably, Tashlhiyt has gemination contrasts for all consonants in all word positions. Perception of these contrasts by natives vs. nonnatives is little documented, with the exception of [Hallé, Ridouane, and Best, 2016], which found that natives performed near ceiling on all contrasts under scrutiny, whereas nonnative French listeners were much better on word-final than-initial contrasts. The authors tentatively proposed that the word-initial and word-final positions engage different perceptual processes. We reexamine these findings using a more comprehensive design including initial, medial, and final positions, using Tashlhiyt native listeners and nonnative listeners from three languages differing in terms of quantitative and qualitative incidence of gemination: Chinese, French, and Japanese. Overall, easy perception of non-initial Tashlhiyt geminate-singleton contrasts by nonnative listeners is confirmed, supporting the earlier proposition that they engage universal perceptual processes. In contrast, word-initial contrasts would require languagespecific learning.