Perception of Tamil Laterals and Trills by Native and Non-Native Speakers

Abstract

The present study investigated native (Tamil) and non-native (Hindi) speaker's ability to discriminate Tamil laterals and trills. Tamil has three laterals - the alveolar / l /, the retroflex /l. / and the retroflexed palatal /l/ and two trills - one flap /r/ and one trill /r/, but Hindi has only alveolar Ill and flap /r/. So it was hypothesized that the ability of Hindi listeners in discriminating non-native laterals and trills will be poorer compared to Tamil listeners. A set of stimuli with minimal word pairs consisting of Tamil laterals and trills was prepared. Subjects were audio presented with the word pairs and were instructed to identify two words in a pair as 'same' or 'different'. ANOVA showed significant difference between groups with a score of 59% and 80% in non-native and native speakers, respectively.