Study of Twenty-Six Intervocalic Consonants as Spoken and Recognized by Four Language Groups

Abstract

Twenty-six intervocalic consonants were recorded by three speakers of each of four languages--Hindi, English, Arabic, and Japanesemand heard by 24 speakers of each of them. The data were treated in two ways. (1) An analysis of variance indicated that listening groups differed and that consonants were unequal in their intelligibility and showed statistically significant interactions between speakers and consonants, between listeners and consonants, and among consonants, listeners, and speakers. All speakers spoke better and all listeners listened better when saying and hearing sounds of their native language. (2) A quantitative procedure employed by Miller and Nicely was adapted to ascertain which features were retained by the listeners in their error responses and whether or not these were similar from one language group to another. All consonants were classified in a binary manner in relation to each of seven channels into which the voice communication network was subdivided. The unusual outcome lay in the ranks of the seven channels in terms of the extents to which they were correctly preserved in the responses. A single rank order in this regard was duplicated for all the listening groups: (1) nasality, (2) place, (3) liquid, (4) voicing, (5) duration, (6) friction, and (7) aspiration.

Evidence for a learning bias against saltatory phonological alternations

“…It is also worth noting that Singh and Black (1966) obtained values for consonants in VCV contexts with no noise, which more closely reflects the conditions of the experiments in the current study. However, the error rates in the Singh and Black study were quite low, making it difficult to draw conclusions about the relative differences in confusability for the sounds relevant here.…”

“…The mutual confusability of two sounds can be computed by taking the rate that each sound is confused for the other in a perceptual identification task (e.g., Miller & Nicely, 1955;Singh & Black, 1966;Wang & Bilger, 1973). In such tasks, participants hear several speech sounds in a particular context, and they must decide which sound they heard on any given trial.…”

Effects of discrimination training on the perception of /r-l/ by Japanese adults learning English

“…Cross-language differences in the perception of a variety of contrasts among both consonants and vowels have been demonstrated using natural speech stimuli (i.e., minimal pair contrasts produced by native speakers) and several sorts of perceptual tasks (Gottfried, 1984;Marckwardt, 1944Marckwardt, , 1946Sapon & Carroll, 1958;Singh & Black, 1966;Trehub, 1976;Werker, Gilbert, Humphrey, & Tees, 1981). Studies of categorical perception have also demonstrated cross-language differences in the perception ofacoustic dimensions underlying one or more phonetic contrasts.…”

Patterns of Misperception of Arabic Consonants

“…Lecumberri and Cooke 2006), and very few in languages from other families (e.g. Singh and Black 1966;Bradlow et al 2010). To my knowledge, there is no existing data on the misperception patterns of guttural consonants.…”

“…In English, Dubno and Levitt (1981) found that consonants are more accurately identified in the environment of /a/ than /i/ or /u/; Singh and Black (1966) found that consonants' place of articulation was identified less accurately before /i/ than before other vowels in English but not in other languages. Redford and Diehl (1999) found consonant identifications to be more accurate in cods after high vowels than after /a/, and Wang and Bilger (1973) found that coda consonants, though generally identified less accurately than onsets, were identified more accurately than onsets when the vowel was /i/.…”