On the predictive role of the recent theories of aspiration.
The purpose of this study is to examine the predictive power of recent theories of aspiration. These theories (lag of voicing) predict that aspirated sounds will be perceived as unaspirated in word-final position, as in the case of Korean stops. Contrary to the predictions of these theories, our experiment showed that in final position in Hindi stops, such a neutralization between unaspirated and aspirated stops was absent. What is even more interesting is that the intelligibility of aspirated sounds in Hindi was the highest on the perception scale while unaspirated had a lower rank.
D001307:Auditory Perception; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D010700:Phonetics