Dear Lucy,
> I am looking for a phonetic contrast which is difficult for English
> speakers to perceive, as a control stimulus in a study we are setting up.
> We are examining how well English speakers can learn to discriminate
> this in comparison to the Hindi dental-retroflex contrast. As you are
> probably aware, this contrast is extremely difficult for English
> speakers to perceive, but we are struggling to find an equivalently
> difficult contrast which is not already contained within the phonology
> of Hindi (ruling out aspirated-non aspirated stops, for instance).
> We have tried several contrasts, such as Mandarin alveolo-palatal
> fricative-affricate contrasts, Tagalog nasal contrasts, tonal contrasts,
> but our pilot studies have not found them comparably difficult over
> several learning sessions.
> Any suggestions gratefully received,
In American English, there's the rather subtle intervocalic tapped /t/
vs. /d/ contrast, e.g. liter (litre) vs. leader, latter vs. ladder,
bitter vs. bidder, matter vs. madder, metal/mettle vs. medal/meddle, and
so on, the main difference being a longer vowel before the inherently
voiced /d/ and a somewhat longer or potentially longer intervocalic
consonant, if you're not talking too quickly. This distinction recently
came up in my radio English teaching in Taiwan.
Karen Chung
http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/
http://lists.topica.com/lists/phonetics/
