Universal Perceptual Attributes for Perception of American English Vowels by Eng-lish and Japanese Native Speakers and Im-plications for Language Typology

A universal perceptual space for 10 American English vowel sounds was derived for two groups of listeners-a group of native speakers of English and a group of native speakers of Japanese. Subsets of these two groups made ratings on 12 bipolar adjective scales for the same set of sounds, each of the two groups using anchoring adjec-tives taken from their native language. Although there was no evi-dence of any difference between the two groups in their INDSCAL-derived perceptual dimensions for these vowel sounds, the adjec-tives were used differently in describing those same perceptual di-mensions by the two groups. Though a few of the adjectives were used to describe similar perceptual variations, language typological implications of this investigation is that caution be exercised in gen-eralizing semantic differential ratings obtained in one language, es-pecially when those ratings are intended to aid in the interpretation of data from listeners speaking a different native language.