Perception of Alveolar and Velar Allophones of English /l/ in Word-initial and Word-final positions

The study reports on an experiment designed to test American English speakers’ ability to discriminate between two pairs of sounds that are phonetically similar but characterized by different distributional constraints, namely, on the one hand, velar /l/ and /w/ in word-initial position and, on the other, alveolar /l/ and /n/ in word-final position. Twenty-three subjects participated in the study, who listened to sets of Italian and English real and made-up (and occasionally reversed) words exemplifying the above consonantal phonemes in various vocalic contexts. The study participants correctly identified word-initial alveolar /l/ and word-final velar /l/ as allophones of /l/. However, they tended to misunderstand word-initial velar /l/ as /w/. On the other hand, they misperceived word-final alveolar /l/ as /n/ only occasionally, that is, when it was preceded by front vowels (in the Italian stimuli) or high vowels (in the English stimuli). The study suggests that ascription of sounds to certain phonemic categories depends on a combination of (intuitive knowledge of) distributional information of sounds, perception of the intrinsic phonetic properties of sounds, and the effects of their surrounding environments