Phonemic Interference as a Perceptual Phenomenon

The paper reports the results of a series of experiments in which a set of synthetic vocalic stimuli were presented to speakers of various languages under two conditions. In the first condition, the subject was asked to decide whether or not the sound heard was like a vowel sound of his native language and, if so, to give an example word containing that sound. The examples were then grouped by the subject so that all examples of the same vowel sound were put together. This procedure results in a categorization of the stimuli closely resembling a vowel phoneme inventory of the subject's native language. In the second condition, the subject was asked to repeat the experiment, responding in reference to English vowel sounds. It was found that his English responses are predictable from his native language responses and not from the inventory of English vowel phonemes.