The perceptual assimilation and discrimination of 20 Hindi consonants by native speakers of English

Hindi consonant contrasts are known to pose difficulties for native English speakers (e.g., Polka, 1991; Werker and Tees, 2002; and Cibelli, 2015). While a limited set of Hindi consonants have received a great deal of attention (i.e., the coronal stops), we do not yet know how learners perceive other segments from Hindi’s relatively large consonant inventory. To address this gap, we conducted a perceptual assimilation study modeled after Faris et al. (2018) to investigate the perceptual assimilation of twenty Hindi consonants (tʃ, tʃʰ, dʒ, dʒʰ, t̪, t̪ʰ, d̪, d̪ʰ, ʈ, ʈʰ, ɖ, ɖʰ, ʃ, ʂ, s, z, l, r, ɽ, ɽʰ) by native English speakers with no prior Hindi language learning experience. We later examined the discrimination of 46 pairs from the same set of phones in a new group of participants from the same population using an AX discrimination task. Participants exhibited patterns of perceptual assimilation and discrimination of Hindi phonemes that suggest that native English speakers will experience difficulty across the Hindi consonant inventory. We consider the findings in the context of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1994 and Best and Tyler, 2007), providing a fuller account of the difficulty posed by the Hindi consonant inventory for second-language learners.