The labial-coronal effect revisited: Japanese adults say pata, but hear tapa

摘要

The labial-coronal effect has originally been described as a bias to initiate a word with a labial consonant-vowel-coronal consonant(LC) sequence.This bias has been explained with constraints on the human speech production system, and its perceptual correlates have motivated the suggestion of a perception-production link.However, previous studies exclusively considered languages in which LC sequences are globally more frequent than their counterpart.The current study examined the LC bias in speakers of Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences.We first conducted an analysis of Japanese corpora that qualified this claim, and identified a subgroup of consonants(plosives) exhibiting a CL bias.Second, focusing on this subgroup of consonants, we found diverging results for production and perception such that Japanese speakers exhibited an articulatory LC bias, but a perceptual CL bias.The CL perceptual bias, however, was modulated by language of presentation, and was only present for stimuli recorded by a Japanese, but not a French, speaker.A further experiment with native speakers of French showed the opposite effect, with an LC bias for French stimuli only.Overall, we find support for a universal, articulatory motivated LC bias in production, supporting a motor explanation of the LC effect, while perceptual biases are influenced by distributional frequencies of the native language.