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Does anyone know how quickly German native speakers are able to discriminate between the vowel sounds (/e:/ vs. /i:/) at the beginning of a word e.g. (er ‘he’ vs. ihn ‘him’) upon hearing the vowel sound (the onset)? It would be very helpful if you could back up your answer to the question with sources.

Angie
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    You should rephrase your question because this SE is about the German language, not about looking up scientific papers for others ^^. One could ask, for example, to back up the answer to the actual question with sources. – mtwde Jul 08 '21 at 13:56
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    I consider this as off-topic; the assumption, that German native speakers are significantly different in that respect from native speakers of other languages is already an ambitious claim. – guidot Jul 08 '21 at 13:58
  • Thank you @mtwde for explaining how to better phrase my question! – Angie Jul 08 '21 at 14:25
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    To me it is even unclear what exactly you mean with "how quickly". Do you want to measure the time from playing the sound to the recognition of the vowel? How do you measure when it is recognized? Pressing a button? EEG? – Bodo Jul 08 '21 at 14:26
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    @guidot: I'm not sure what led you to make the assumption that I'm asking in comparison to native speakers of other languages... – Angie Jul 08 '21 at 14:26
  • @Bodo that's a very good question: maybe in an eye-tracking setup? Putton press would maybe be too slow to show just how quickly they can differentiate... – Angie Jul 08 '21 at 14:32
  • @Bodo: and yes, I mean "the time from playing the sound to the recognition of the vowel" – Angie Jul 08 '21 at 14:33
  • @Angie wrt. guidot's comment: I suppose he mean that you would need to "normalize" that study, comparing to other languages, which for the way the question is phrased, seems ok to assume. If not, you want an absoulte quantity, right? Do you ask for seconds then and you don't want a ratio (comparing to other language)? I am afraid I don't understand the question. Probably the whole mathematical/quantitative setup should be in the body of the question – c.p. Jul 08 '21 at 14:37
  • @Angie All additional information or clarification should be [edit]ed into the question. Apart from the fact that it is difficult to measure, you should explain what you would (want to) gain from an answer. You specify one pair of vowels and refer to "German native speakers", so one could assume you might want to compare either different pairs of vowels or speakers of different languages. Without a comparison, scale or classification, a possible result like "the measured time for the discrimination has a normal distribution with mean value X and standard deviation Y" would have no value. – Bodo Jul 08 '21 at 14:55
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    @guidot, some non-native speakers have trouble distinguishing them at all. – Carsten S Jul 08 '21 at 14:59
  • @c.p. thank you for clarifying. Yes, I'm looking for an absolute quantity (rather msecs than seconds). If I want to make the claim that a comprehender is able to quickly discriminate between vowel sounds in his/her language (in this case, it just happens to be German and the vowels are e: and i:), then I need to back up that claim with proof. I don't want to compare across languages, because for now I'm not interested in how quickly native speakers of other language process these vowels, especially as /e:/ vs. /i:/ might not exist in other languages) – Angie Jul 08 '21 at 15:00
  • @Angie Please [edit] your question and add all information/clarification from your comments to the question. I still don't understand how you want to proof for a possible claim about something being done quickly or not with a single absolute measurement without any comparison. – Bodo Jul 08 '21 at 15:57
  • After reading comments I still wonder what this question is about. Do people actively discriminate vowels or do they rather recognize the entire word as an entity? Lots of things are examined in this world, but are you sure someone really did test that? Perhaps you can tell a little more about the background. What is different between germans and others, or between vowels and sounds in general? – puck Jul 08 '21 at 18:03
  • I am pretty sure that any speaker of any language doesn't recognize single vowels when listening. The patterns you listen to and match to words you know are typically much bigger, at least on the level of syllable granularity. – tofro Jul 08 '21 at 19:08
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    VTC, could you please clarify what you're trying to learn with this question and how it relates to the topic of German language? This seems like a general linguistics question to me, and even if someone conducted a study and told us a number of milliseconds, what would that accomplish? Do you know any other data to compare this to? – HalvarF Jul 08 '21 at 20:51
  • If I want to make the claim that a comprehender is able to quickly discriminate between vowel sounds in his/her language […] then I need to back up that claim […] – We are getting closer to the Y to your X. Instead of measuring recognition times, it is probably better to compare the time and accuracy for distinguishing minimal pairs (e.g., Egel vs. Igel) to that for distinguishing clearly different words (e.g., Katze vs. Vogel). Still, what is your actual claim? That native German speakers have no difficulties distinguishing /e:/ and /i:/? – Wrzlprmft Jul 09 '21 at 06:20

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