The goal of the present study was to devise a means of representing languages in a
perceptual similarity space based on their overall phonetic similarity. In Experiment 1, native
English listeners performed a free classification task in which they grouped 17 diverse
languages based on their perceived phonetic similarity. A similarity matrix of the grouping
patterns was then submitted to clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses. In
Experiment 2, an independent group of native English listeners sorted the group of 17 …