Language-specific differences in the weighting of perceptual cues for labiodentals

Cross-language perception provides insight into the use of perceptual cues to native segments and their application to segments in a different language. In the present study we test the perception of the three Dutch labiodentals /f, v, ʋ/ by listeners of German, English, Croatian and Polish in a forced-choice identification task. We test whether the perceptual boundaries on the auditory dimensions of harmonics-to-noise ratio and duration are more similar for listeners from the same language family (German and English versus Croatian and Polish) or whether these boundaries are more similar for listeners with the same number of labial categories in their native languages (German and Croatian with four labials versus English and Polish with five). Our findings show that the same number of labial categories results in similar perceptual boundaries along the two auditory dimensions, and that language family does not influence the location of the boundaries.