Relating production and perception in two Raglai dialects at different stages of registrogenesis

This paper explores the perception of two diachronically related and mutually intelligible phonological oppositions, the onset voicing contrast of Northern Raglai and the register contrast of Southern Raglai. It is the continuation of a previous acoustic study that revealed that Northern Raglai onset stops maintain a voicing distinction accompanied by weak formant and voice quality modulations on following vowels, while Southern Raglai has transphonologized this voicing contrast into a register contrast marked by vowel and voice quality distinctions. Our findings indicate that the two dialects partially differ in their use of identification cues, Northern Raglai listeners using both voicing and F1 as major cues while Southern Raglai listeners largely focus on F1. Production and perception are thus not perfectly aligned in Northern Raglai, because F1 plays a stronger role in perception than production in this dialect. We conclude that mutual intelligibility between dialects is possible because they both use F1 for identification.