An appropriate metric for cue weighting in L2 speech perception: Response to Escudero and Boersma (2004)

Flege, Bohn, and Jang (1997) and Escudero and Boersma (2004) analyzed first language-Spanish second language-English listeners' perception of English /i/-/I/ continua that varied in spectral and duration properties. They compared individuals and groups on the basis of spectral reliance and duration reliance measures. These reliance measures indicate the change in identification rates from one extreme of the stimulus space to the other; they make use of only a portion of the data collected and suffer from a ceiling effect. The current paper presents a reanalysis of Escudero and Boersma's data using first-order logistic regression modeling. All of the available data contribute to the calculation of logistic regression coefficients, and they do not suffer from the same ceiling effect as the reliance measures. It is argued that - as a metric of cue weighting - logistic regression coefficients offer methodological and substantive advantages over the reliance measures.