The goal of the present study was to devise a means of representing languages in a perceptual similarity space based on their overall phonetic similarity. In Experiment 1, native English listeners performed a free classification task in which they grouped 17 diverse languages based on their perceived phonetic similarity. A similarity matrix of the grouping patterns was then submitted to clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses. In Experiment 2, an independent group of native English listeners sorted the group of 17 languages in terms of their distance from English. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 with four groups of non-native English listeners: Dutch, Mandarin, Turkish and Korean listeners. Taken together, the results of these three experiments represent a step towards establishing an approach to assess the overall phonetic similarity of languages. This approach could potentially provide the basis for developing predictions regarding foreign-accented speech intelligibility for various listener groups, and regarding speech perception accuracy in the context of background noise in various languages.

本研究的目标是设计一种基于语言整体语音相似性在感知相似性空间中表示语言的方法。在实验 1 中，母语为英语的听众执行了一项自由分类任务，他们根据感知到的语音相似性对 17 种不同的语言进行了分组。然后将分组模式的相似性矩阵提交给聚类和多维标度分析。在实验 2 中，一组独立的以英语为母语的听众根据与英语的距离对 17 种语言进行了排序。实验 3 对四组非英语母语听众重复实验 2：荷兰语、普通话、土耳其语和韩语听众。综合起来，这三个实验的结果代表了朝着建立一种评估语言整体语音相似性的方法迈出的一步。这种方法可能为预测各种听众群体的外国口音语音清晰度，以及在各种语言的背景噪声背景下的语音感知准确性提供基础。