This study investigates the interference of L1 phonology with L2 speech perception, focusing on the identification of the English fricatives /f/ and /h/ by Japanese listeners. In Japanese, the contrast of /f/ vs /h/ is lost only in the /_u/ environment by neutralization (/fu/ and /hu/ > [ɸu]). This makes food vs who’d extremely difficult for Japanese to discern while fee vs he poses no problem. Perceptual experiments demonstrated that while /f/ and /h/ were accurately identifiable when isolated from non-/u/ syllables [e.g. f(a) vs h(a)], those isolated from /_u/ were rather hard [f(u) vs h(u)] and became even harder when presented with the vowel [fu vs hu]. Such Cs alone [f(u)/h(u)] were easier than the whole CVs [fu/hu] from which those Cs were excised, contrary to our general expectations. A cross-splicing experiment further revealed it was not the acoustics of coarticulated fricatives but the presentation of /u/ that made the identification difficult. The basic phonetic process of f/h was debilitated in fu/hu, where the L1 neutralization applied, cancelling the contrast and the need for attunement, which was then transferred to L2. It was argued that the L1-L2 sound correspondence can be affected by the knowledge of L1 phonological processes.

本研究调查了 L1 音系对 L2 语音感知的干扰，重点是日本听众对英语擦音 /f/ 和 /h/ 的识别。在日语中，/f/ 与 /h/ 的对比仅在 /_u/ 环境中通过中和（/fu/ 和 /hu/ > [ɸu]）而丢失。这使得日本人很难辨别食物与谁，而费用与他没有问题。感知实验表明，虽然 /f/ 和 /h/ 从非 /u/ 音节中分离出来时可以准确识别[例如 f(a) vs h(a)]，但从 /_u/ 中分离出来的那些相当难[f(u ) vs h(u)]，当出现元音 [fu vs hu] 时变得更加困难。与我们的普遍预期相反，单独的此类 Cs [f(u)/h(u)] 比切除这些 Cs 的整个 CVs [fu/hu] 更容易。交叉剪接实验进一步表明，不是联合擦音的声学，而是 /u/ 的表现使识别变得困难。f/h 的基本语音过程在 fu/hu 中被削弱，其中应用了 L1 中和，消除了对比和调音的需要，然后转移到 L2。