The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of phonation

This study investigates the role linguistic experience has on the perception of phonation and acoustic properties that correlate with this perception. Listeners from Gujarati (contrasts breathy versus modal vowels), Spanish (no breathiness) and English (allophonic breathiness) participated in: (1) a similarity-rating task, indicating the similarity of modal and/or breathy Mazatec vowels and (2) a free-sort task, sorting breathy and modal stimuli from many languages.Results showed that Gujaratis did better at distinguishing phonation in other languages/dialects and were more consistent. English listeners did no better than Spanish listeners, despite the allophonic breathiness in English. In terms of acoustic dimensions, results showed that Gujaratis relied on H1−H2 (amplitude of the first harmonic minus amplitude of the second harmonic), English listeners relied weakly on H1−H2 and cepstral peak prominence and Spanish listeners relied on H1−A1 (amplitude of first formant peak) and H1−H2. While it is not clear why Spanish listeners used H1−A1, we can speculate as to why all three groups of listeners used H1−H2. Cross-linguistically, H1−H2, which is correlated with the open quotient (Holmberg, Hillman, Perkell, Guiod, & Goldman, 1995), is the most successful measure of phonation. Perhaps the reason is a perceptual one; open quotient differences might be more salient to listeners.