Abstract

Native and non-native identification is challenging but is very important in speech and speaker recognition. The current study was carried out with the aim of testing the categorization ability across three group of non-native listeners of Malayalam (children, young adults and older adults). Stimulus was presented in phonemes, words and sentence levels. It was found that there was significant difference across the three groups. The non-native listeners found it difficult to discriminate the native and non-native listeners at the phoneme level. At sentence level, the participants found it easier to differentiate the native and nonnative listeners.