Acoustic cues to the perception of plosive voicing in Madurese

Madurese, a Malayo-Polynesian language of Indonesia, is described as having a three-way phonation contrast between voiced, voiceless, and aspirated plosives. However, acoustic evidence suggests that the voiceless vs aspirated contrast might be marginal because of small differences in voice onset time (VOT) and large differences in the following vowel height (F1). This raises the question of how these cues are weighted in the perception of the voicing contrast. This paper presents a series of experiments designed to see if Madurese listeners discriminate differences in the positive VOT range, and to what extent they use VOT and F1 to identify plosives. Although listeners were able to discriminate between VOT differences of naturally occurring magnitudes in an AXB task, use of positive VOT when distinguishing voiceless from aspirated plosives in a three alternative forced choices task was highly individually specific, even when F1 was uninformative. Conversely, negative VOT emerged as a more robust cue to the voiced category. These results suggest that the Madurese laryngeal contrast is primarily a two-way contrast signaled through differences in (pre-)voicing but not aspiration. The weak but reliable acoustic covariance between vowel height and aspiration may instead have a diachronic and/or physiological-aerodynamic basis.