A Search for the Perceptual Features of the 29 Prevocalic Hindi Consonants
Sadanand Singh, Kala Singh · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1972
The 29 consonants of Hindi were recorded prevocalically with the vowel /ʌ/. Each consonant was included in proportion to its statistical probability in Hindi. Thus, while /p/ was included five times, /k/ 14 times. Ten native speakers of Hindi listened the stimuli in each ear separately in five S/N ratio conditions. Listeners responded in an openchoice manner. The responses were written in Devnāgri script. The tallies were made for all the errors which were then averaged for each stimulus consonant across the 10 subjects. The analysis of the 10 matrices (five S/N ratio × Ears) by IND-SCAL method provided beat interpretation in fivedimensional space. The perceptual features obtained were best described in articulatory terms. The first two dimensions were interpreted as voicing, aspiration, and sonarant with further interpretation of sonarant as: retroflection, nasality, laterality, and semivowel. A subset of 22 consonants, for which place of articulation was phonogically distinctive, was further analyzed. The analysis yielded perceptual features (with articulatory nomenclature) front/back and palatal. [This work was partially supported by a grant from NIH.]