Perception of Hindi retroflex versus dental stops by monolingual speakers of American English

Abstract

Cross‐language studies have shown that foreign consonant contrasts vary in the degree of perceptual difficulty that they present adult non‐native listeners. Phonemic, phonetic, and acoustic factors have been considered important in accounting for this variability. These factors were examined by comparing English listeners' perception of the Hindi retroflex versus dental place‐of‐articulation contrast in four different voicing contexts: prevoiced, voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated, and breathy voiced. Differences in the perceptual difficulty of the four Hindi contrasts were predicted based on: (1) phonemic status (the functional status of the contrast in listeners' native phonology), (2) phonetic familiarity (as allophones or free variants), (3) differences in acoustic salience related to voicing, and (4) assimilation strategies. Differences in performance in a categorial AX discrimination task were ordered from most to least errors: prevoiced, voiceless aspirated, breathy‐voiced, and voiceless unaspirated. Perceptual differences were correlated with both acoustic salience of place cues and subjects' descriptions of their assimilation strategies. [Work supported by NICHD and NINCDS.]