The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of pathologically-disordered phonation

Ladefoged [Vocal Fold Physiology: Contemporary Research and Clinical Issues, College Hill Press, San Diego, 1983] wrote, what is a pathological voice quality in one language may be phonologically contrastive in another If one persons pathology is another persons phonemic phonation, then speakers of languages with phonation contrasts should treat pathologically‐disordered and linguistically‐relevant phonations in the same way. To test this, Gujarati (breathy versus modal contrast), Spanish (no breathiness) and English (allophonic breathiness) listeners participated in similarity‐rating tasks. One used Mazatec (breathy, modal, and creaky phonation) stimuli, the other pathologically‐disordered stimuli. Gujaratis treated pathologically‐disordered stimuli and Mazatec stimuli in the same way. With both types of stimuli, Gujaratis based their judgments on H1−H2 (amplitude of the first harmonic minus the second) and mapped the stimuli into clusters with similar H1−H2 values across the two experiments. In both experiments, English listeners relied on cepstral peak prominence and H1−H2, and Spanish listeners relied on H1−H2 and H1−A1 (amplitude of first formant peak). English and Spanish listeners grouped both types of stimuli into clusters with similar values for the acoustic measures. However, English and Spanish listeners differed in how they weighed the importance of the different dimensions across the experiments. To English and Spanish listeners, pathologically‐disordered phonations are subtly different from linguistically‐relevant ones.