Effect of phonetics training in the perception of the four-way stop contrast by native English-speaking learners of Hindi

The Hindi four-way stop contrast poses a challenge in speech production and perception for native English-speaking learners of Hindi. This study tests the perceptual accuracy of the four-way stop contrast by native speakers of English and if it improves if they are explicitly taught about the phonetic details of the stops including their articulatory mechanisms and the resulting acoustic signals. Data was collected from two sets of participants1) learners who were provided the phonetics training (n=11, male=5, female= 6) and 2) learners who were not provided the phonetics training (n=12, male=6, female 6). Participants were native speakers of American English and learners of Hindi. Participants from both groups responded to 270 audio stimuli of CVs; the Cs were the different stop types and the V was /a/, e.g.: /ta/, /pa/, /tha/, /gha/. Participants had to select the CV they heard from a selection of 6 choices shown on their computer screen simultaneously. Results show a higher perceptual accuracy (70.37% accuracy) in the group that received the phonetics training compared to the one that did not (63.37% accuracy). This 7% difference was significant according to a linear mixed effects model (t value = 8.977, p value <0.05) suggesting a significant effect of phonetics training in the perception of the four-way stop contrast. An important future direction of this study is to test whether this perceptual accuracy is also reflected in speech production.