Influence of Dravidian Languages On Speech Perception: A Comparative Study

Indian languages have several psychophysical salience of contrast like variations in pronunciation, stress & rhythm and intonation pattern. With listener’s experience, features enrolled in the contrast may vary the speech perception scores for native and non-native speakers. Dravidian languages spoken in Mangalore-India by native and non native speakers, also show variations in pronunciation, stress & rhythm and intonation pattern. There is dearth of information on speech perception scores over the Dravidian languages. Thus the study aimed at finding out the speech perception scores of native and non-native listeners when native and non-native stimulus is delivered. A total of 24 individuals participated. The stimulus consisted of Kannada Articulation Test and Malayalam Articulation Test recorded by native and non-native speakers each. The individual’s verbal responses were judged on 3-point rating scale decided by five experienced Audiologists and Speech Language Pathologists. The results showed higher speech perception scores for Kannada Articulation Test and Malayalam Articulation Test when the stimulus was recorded by native and non-native speaker of each language and perceived by native and non-native listener. Overall, it can be concluded that native listeners of the respective language yielded better scores when the words were recorded by native and non-native speakers.