Perception of voicing in English fricatives by Spanish listeners

Resumen

Speech contrasts which are not functionally distinctive in the mother tongue are difficult to differentiate perceptually for non-native listeners. A two-fold experiment was carried out in order to investigate the L2 perception by 26 Spanish listeners of English, with an English group used as a control. In the present paper, listeners were exposed to the English contrast /s/ vs. /z/, which is not phonemic in Spanish, in two synthesized words, Sue and zoo. The results showed that there were listeners who had already acquired the contrast with some language-specific differences in the use of some of the acoustic cues that signalled this contrast. Furthermore there was no correlation between the results obtained and the variables age of L2 learning, length of L2 learning, or listener’s age. Final conclusions will be drawn from this research and the previous work devoted to place of articulation differences.