Comparison of perceptual vowel space for native vowels for monolingual and bilingual speakers of Malayalam.

Abstract

This study examines the perceptual vowel space for Malayalam for monolingual and bilingual Malayalam speakers. Malayalam is the native language of the state of Kerala, India, which uses five long and short vowels. Hence, in addition to spectral differences, speakers of Malayalam may use duration for the identification of vowels. This is different from English, which uses predominantly spectral differences alone as the major cue for vowel identification, even though there are intrinsic differences in duration for the English tense/lax vowels. There were two groups of subjects, native speakers of Malayalam and speakers of Malayalam who have also been speaking English for at least 10 years, with ten subjects in each group. The stimuli consisted of synthetic tokens of isolated vowels, which varied in first, second, and third formant frequencies. An identification task, followed by rating task, was carried out. This study maps the perceptual vowel space of native Malayalam speakers and also addresses a less widely studied area of cross‐language speech perception, i.e., the influence of second language on the perception of the native language. Thus, the results provide a basis for the examination of the influence of long‐term use of English on the perception of native Malayalam vowels.