Nonnative sound perception might be challenging for adult listeners since they attune from a very young age to the phonological aspects of their native language and, thus, every nonnative sound is filtered through their first language. The present study investigates the perception of Greek consonants in both Consonant-Vowel (CV) and Vowel-Consonant (VC) syllable context by Russian monolingual speakers. To this purpose, 16 Russian speakers aged 19–26 who are students in a University in Moscow and have no knowledge of Greek participated in the study. The participants were tested in an assimilation task in which they were asked to assimilate Greek consonants to their native language phonological categories and in an AXB discrimination task to examine their ability in discriminating nonnative consonantal contrasts. The predictions of the study were developed using the framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). In the assimilation task, the Russian speakers assimilated, as expected, the Greek consonants [t d g x] to the very similar Russian phonological categories [t d g x]. The Greek consonants [θ ð] were merged with the Russian categories [f z] respectively, while the Greek [ç] fell into the Russian phonological category [x^j]. By contrast, the Greek consonant [ɟ] was not perceived as an instance of any phonological category of the listeners’ first language. With respect to the discrimination task, the discrimination scores of the Greek contrasts [θ]-[t], [ð]-[d], [ɟ]-[g], and [ç]-[x] ranged from very good to excellent. The findings indicate that Russian speakers assimilated consonants that are not present in their first language in different phonological categories than those proposed by the literature, and that the feature of consonant palatalization that is present in Russian, assisted the listeners to more consistently identify the Greek palatal fricatives. Moreover, the assimilation of Greek consonants differed in some cases for CV vs. VC context and the discrimination of one Greek contrast was different in CV vs. VC context. In general, the results demonstrate that acoustic features found in the speakers’ first language interfered with the perception of nonnative consonants, and that the assimilation of nonnative fricatives (i.e., [θ ð]) to Russian fricative categories (i.e., [f z]) can be explained by the conformation of the speakers’ native language to the faithfulness constraint, which led the speakers to preserving the continuant feature.

对于成年听众来说，非本地声音感知可能会面临挑战，因为他们从很小的年龄就开始调音到母语的语音方面，因此，每个非本地声音都通过其母语进行过滤。本研究调查了俄语单语使用者在辅音-Vowel（CV）和元音-辅音（VC）音节语境中对希腊辅音的感知。为此，参加研究的是16名19-26岁的俄语使用者，他们是莫斯科一所大学的学生，他们不懂希腊语。在同化任务中对参与者进行了测试，要求他们将希腊辅音同化为他们的母语语音分类，并在AXB歧视任务中检查他们辨别非本位辅音对比的能力。知觉同化模型（PAM）。在同化任务中，俄语使用者如预期的那样将希腊辅音[tdgx]吸收到了非常相似的俄罗斯语音分类[tdgx]。希腊辅音[θð]分别与俄语类别[fz]合并，而希腊语[ç]归入俄语语音分类[x ^j]]。相比之下，希腊辅音[ɟ]并未被视为听众母语的任何语音类别的一个实例。关于区分任务，希腊语对比[θ]-[t]，[ð]-[d]，[ɟ]-[g]和[ç]-[x]的区分分数非常好优秀。研究结果表明，俄语母语者同化了辅音，而辅音在母语中的出现与文献中所提出的语音分类不同，并且俄语中辅音板化的特征有助于听众更加一致地识别希腊语lat语。擦音。而且，在CV vs. VC语境中，希腊辅音的同化在某些情况下是不同的，并且在CV vs. VC语境中，对一种希腊语对比的区别也不同。一般来说，