Distinguishing breathy consonants and vowels in Gujarati

AbstractAcross languages, the acoustic and articulatory correlates of breathiness are similar whether they are associated with consonants or with vowels. This raises the question of whether breathy consonants are confusable with breathy vowels in languages in which a phonemically breathy vowel contrasts with a phonemically modal vowel that follows a breathy-aspirated consonant, e. g. Gujarati /ba̤ɾ/ ‘outside’ vs. /bʱaɾ/ ‘burden’, respectively. We investigate the perception of a minimal triplet of Gujarati words, with a breathy vowel vs. a breathy consonant vs. an all-modal sequence, via three tasks: free-sort, AX discrimination, and picture-matching identification. Results across the three tasks indicate that breathiness is indeed confusable across the association types. Specifically, while listeners do recognize the stronger breathiness in vowels following breathy consonants, they are not necessarily able to determine whether that breathiness is associated with the vowel or the consonant. Furthermore, they do not reliably recognize the subtler breathiness of breathy vowels, which often indicates that they are the same as or an acceptable realization of an all-modal sequence (/baɾ/ ‘twelve’). This suggests a potential perceptual merger in Gujarati, despite previously-reported evidence of a robust three-way contrast in production.