The present study is aimed an electropalatographic investigation of Korean fricatives /s/ and /s*/. All data from this study is based on the production of 5-adult speakers who speak Korean as their first language. Methods: Electropalatography (EPG) is an instrumental technique for showing tongue and palate contact during speech. The participants recorded

Objectives: In a clinical setting, a ‘trained ear’ is the essentials for speech–language pathologists (SLPs) because most SLPs rely on the auditory - perceptual method during assessment and treatment for speech difficulties. However, transcribing distortion errors using only auditory-perceptual judgement is a difficult task. This study investigated the auditory– perceptual ability in terms of distortion errors for pre and present SLPs.Methods: Sixty pre and present SLPs completed a survey, then performed a perceptual judgement task which was manufactured by electropalatography (EPG). The task consisted of 30 questions, including distorted (dentalized, palatalized, lateralized) and normal speech samples of Korean fricative /s/ with different types of vowels (/ɑ/, /u/) and lengths (1-syllabled, 2- syllabled, sentence).Results: There was no significant difference in the distortion task among three groups. All participants had the highest score in “dentalization”, the lowest in “lateralization”, and all distortion types were perceived better in the /u/ context than /ɑ/. Also, SLPs tended to judge “lateralization” errors as “normal articulation” and many of the participants perceived “palatalization” as “lateralization”.Conclusion: The results of this study indicated that active auditory training for SLPs is necessary to improve auditory perceptual ability, and suggests that EPG could be a useful instrument for the auditory training program.

Objectives: This paper used electropalatography (EPG) to investigate the actual pronunciation when two plosives with the same articulation position appear successively. We aimed to determine the presence of the preceding consonant (C₁) in two successive consonants (VC₁C₂V) with the same articulation place.Methods: Tongue-to-palate contacts were recorded during the pronunciation of 8 words and 4 sentences containing those words by 5 normal adults and the closure duration and the maximum contact frame for utterance units (word, sentence), meanings (real word, nonword), and syllable structures (VC₁C₂V, VCV) were analyzed.Results: The closure duration in the syllable structures and the maximum contact frame in the meanings showed significant differences. The closure duration of the VC₁C₂V structure was significantly longer than that of the VCV structure in case of words; however, the difference reduced in the case of sentences. The maximum contact frame of the real words was significantly higher than that of non-words.Conclusion: Since the temporal characteristics between VCV and VC₁C₂V structure was distinguished and the tensification of C₂ indirectly showed the existence of C₁. These result support the fact that the preceding consonant is not deleted in two successive consonants with the same articulation place.