John S. PRUITT, Reiko A. YAMADA
The Perception of Hindi Dental and Retroflex Stop Consonants by Native Japanese and English Speakers
I: Initial Perception
Abstract:Previous research has shown that American English speakers have great difficulty distinguishing dental versus
retroflex stop consonants of the Hindi language (which occur in five manner/voicing contexts).
While both dental and retroflex consonants occur as allophones in English in several phonetic contexts,
they do not occur phonemically. Furthermore, American English contains the rhotic /ɹ/, which frequently is produced
as a retroflex. In spite of this rich allophonic experience with dental and retroflex consonant allophones,
English speakers have great difficulty in distinguishing the Hindi sounds. Unlike English, the Japanese language
includes a distinction which is similar to the Hindi distinction - the Japanese /d/ versus the flapped /r/.
The Japanese /d/ is typically produced as an dental/alveolar stop while the flapped /r/ is either palatalized or
retroflexed. However, no research has determined whether Japanese speakers can distinguish the Hindi contrast.
The present research compared the ability of English, Japanese, and a control group of native Hindi speakers to
distinguish Hindi dental versus retroflex stop-consonants in four contexts (voiced-aspirated, voiced-unaspirated,
voiceless-aspirated, and voiceless-unaspirated). Subjects were
presented consonant-vowel syllables in three vowel contexts (/a/, /e/, /o/) which were produced by two native Hindi
speakers. Marked differences in identification scores were found between all three language groups which were partially
dependent upon the manner /voicing context of the consonants. As expected, native Hindi speakers performed near
perfectly while Japanese and English speakers performed less well. In general, however, Japanese speakers had a
distinct advantage over English speakers in perceiving this contrast. Thus, it appears that the functionally similar
contrast that Japanese has to Hindi provides a better experiential basis for perceiving the nonnative Hindi contrast
than the allophonic experience of English speakers.