The Effect of Linguistic Experience on Perceptual Similarity Among Nasal Consonants: A Multidimensional Scaling Analysis

In cross-language speech perception studies, the perceptual categories of a listener group are often assumed to be adequately represented by single, abstract labels, such as the position-dependent allophonic variant of a phoneme. However, listeners of different languages may also vary in their perceptual weighting of acoustic cues that signal a given phoneme, or its allophonic realization, in their language. These two competing units of analysis were evaluated in a cross-language perceptual similarity test employing a broad range of non-native stimuli and listener groups. In this experiment, an AXB classification test using nasal consonants from Malayalam (bilabial, interdental, alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar) was administered to three sets of listener groups with common coronal nasal inventories: dental-retroflex (Marathi, Punjabi), alveolar-retroflex (Tamil, Oriya), and alveolar (Bengali, American English). A two-dimensional multidimensional scaling analysis of the similarity scores revealed language-specific differences that were not predictable from the test groups’ nasal inventories, as represented by positiondependent allophones. The dental-retroflex and alveolar groups showed intra-group differences in their clustering of stimuli and their weighting of both perceptual dimensions, leading to language-specific perceptual spaces. Only the alveolar-retroflex group spaces were similarly organized. The results demonstrate that descriptions of the native perceptual categories of listeners must be made at the level of the individual acoustic cues that are used to match acoustic input to particular perceptual categories, rather than abstract labels.