A cross-language study of the identification of non-native nasal consonants varying in place of articulation

Seven listener groups, varying in terms of the nasal consonant inventory of their native language, orthographically labeled and rated a set of naturally produced non-native nasal consonants varying in place of articulation. The seven listener groups included speakers of Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, and American English. The stimulus set included bilabial, dental, alveolar, and retroflex nasals from Malayalam, Marathi, and Oriya. The stimulus set and nasal consonant inventories of the seven listener groups were described by both phonemic and allophonic representations. The study was designed to determine the extent to which phonemic and allophonic representations of perceptual categories can be used to predict a listener group's identification of non-native sounds. The results of the experiment showed that allophonic representations were more successful in predicting the native category that listeners used to label a non-native sound in a majority of trials. However, both representations frequently failed to accurately predict the goodness of fit between a non-native sound and a perceptual category. The results demonstrate that the labeling and rating of non-native stimuli were conditioned by a degree of language-specific phonetic detail that corresponds to perceptually relevant cues to native language contrasts.