The perception of pathologically-disordered phonation by Gujarati, English, and Spanish listeners

This study investigates the influence of linguistic experience on the perception of pathologically-disordered voices using 18 listeners of American English, which has allophonic breathiness, 12 listeners of Gujarati, which contrasts breathy and modal vowels, and 18 listeners of Spanish, which has neither allophonic nor phonemic breathiness. Listeners rated the similarity of pairs of pathologically-disordered voices. Multidimensional scaling was used to determine the properties that were most correlated with perception for each listener group. Results showed that Gujaratis' perception was correlated with the difference between the amplitude of the first (HI*) and second (H2*) harmonic (HI*-H2*), which is associated with the production of phonation in Gujarati. English listeners' judgments were correlated with the measure HI*-H2* and cepstral peak prominence, and Spanish listeners' judgments were correlated with HI*-H2 and HI*-AI* (the amplitude of the principal harmonic near the first formant). When compared to Esposito (2006), which asked the same listeners to rate the similarity of breathy and modal vowels from Mazatec, results showed that Gujarati listeners classified the pathologically-disordered stimuli in the same way that they classified the Mazatec stimuli, while English and Spanish listeners perceived the pathologically-disordered stimuli and the Mazatec stimuli in slightly different ways.