Patterns of Misperception of Arabic Consonants

Abstract

There has been much investigation into perception of speech sounds, demonstrating a range of influences including listeners’ native language (e.g. Cutler et al. 2004), the sounds’ position in the syllable (e.g. Wang and Bilger 1973), and the presence of different types of masking noise (e.g. Phatak, Lovitt, and Allen 2008). However, there is no data on patterns of misperception of guttural consonants (uvulars, pharyngeals, and glottals); data on consonant discrimination in Arabic (e.g. Kishon-Rabin and Rosenhouse 2000) and the phonological characteristics of gutturals (cf. McCarthy 1994) suggest that they may pattern distinctly from consonants with other places of articulation. The study introduced here will investigate patterns in directionality of misperception of guttural consonants by presenting syllables containing guttural and non-guttural consonants in noise to be identified by native and non-native speakers of Arabic. While there have been studies on how patterns of misperception of phonological structure differ depending on whether the structure is licit or not within the listener’s native language (e.g. Dupoux et al. 1999), there have been few studies on the patterns of misperception that are present in identification of structures which are licit within a language. This study investigates such patterns and how they differ between guttural and non-guttural consonants.