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This study compared the contrastive phonation types of four languages—Gujarati (modal vs. breathy), Hmong (modal vs. breathy vs. creaky), Mazatec (modal vs. breathy vs. creaky), and Yi (tense vs. lax)—on several acoustic measures, within and across languages. For Gujarati, Hmong, and Yi, two electroglottographic (EGG) measures were also compared; a Contact Quotient measure distinguished the within-language phonation types in all three languages. While several acoustic measures distinguished phonation types within each language, only H1*-H2* did so in all four languages. However, when each within-language phonation category was then compared across languages, each category was found to differ from language to language on multiple acoustic measures, e.g. breathy in Hmong is distinct from breathy in Gujarati. This unexpected result suggests that language/speaker differences in voice quality are larger than phonation category differences. This suggestion finds support in a Multi-Dimensional Scaling analysis of the acoustic measures. A three-dimensional space turns out to mostly distinguish the languages, less so the phonations. The phonation categories do not form clusters in this space across languages as might have been expected, but they do occupy separate regions along the third dimension of the space, a dimension correlated especially with H1*-H2*. Thus H1*-H2* is again seen to be the most important measure of phonation contrasts across languages.

Across languages, the acoustic and articulatory correlates of breathiness are similar whether they are associated with consonants or with vowels. This raises the question of whether breathy consonants are confusable with breathy vowels in languages in which a phonemically breathy vowel contrasts with a phonemically modal vowel that follows a breathy-aspirated consonant, e. g. Gujarati /ba̤ɾ/ 'outside' vs. /bʱaɾ/ 'burden', respectively. We investigate the perception of a minimal triplet of Gujarati words, with a breathy vowel vs. a breathy consonant vs. an all-modal sequence, via three tasks: free-sort, AX discrimination, and picture-matching identification. Results across the three tasks indicate that breathiness is indeed confusable across the association types. Specifically, while listeners do recognize the stronger breathiness in vowels following breathy consonants, they are not necessarily able to determine whether that breathiness is associated with the vowel or the consonant. Furthermore, they do not reliably recognize the subtler breathiness of breathy vowels, which often indicates that they are the same as or an acceptable realization of an all-modal sequence (/baɾ/ 'twelve'). This suggests a potential perceptual merger in Gujarati, despite previously-reported evidence of a robust three-way contrast in production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]