The role of prevoicing, breathy-voicing and aspiration in the perception of breathy-voiced stops in Bangla

Abstract This study investigated the role of prevoicing, breathy-voicing, and plain-aspiration in the perception of the voiced-aspirated stop category in Bangla. 31 native speakers of Bangla undertook two different perception experiments where they had to identify what stop category they can hear in forced-choice MCQ tasks. Each experiment presented 25 stimuli (repeated 3 times) that were artificially manipulated; stimuli in Experiment-1 were manipulated for the duration of prevoicing and breathy-interval, while stimuli in Experiment-2 were manipulated for the duration of prevoicing and plain-aspiration. A total of 4650 response tokens were collected in two experiments. Results revealed that a prevoicing interval of about 40ms and a breathy interval of about 20–40 ms are required for the perception of voiced-aspirates. In addition, listeners showed a clear preference for breathy-voicing over plain-aspiration when categorizing sounds as voiced-aspirated stop, indicating that breathy-voicing is perceived to be better associated with voiced-aspirates. Implications for the general phonetics of voiced-aspirates are discussed in the light of the results.