Japanese and Korean speakers’ production of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ts/*

Japanese and Korean speakers' perceptual boundary and discrimination sensitivity of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ʦ/

“…The Korean speakers' perceptual boundary was closer to the origin than that of the Japanese speakers. This Korean speakers' boundary shift in perception of /s/ and / ¶/ is qualitatively consistent with their boundary shift in the production of /s/ and / ¶/ found in Yamakawa and Amano [15] (see Fig. 3 in their article).…”

“…These characteristics are desirable for creating a stimulus continuum between /s/ and / ¶/ because the stimuli on the stimulus continuum are probably free from the bias caused by the difference in phoneme sequence, accent pattern, and auditory-word familiarity. Furthermore, these same minimal pair words were used in Yamakawa and Amano [15], who studied the production boundary of /s/ and / ¶/. The usage of the same pair words is beneficial to the comparison between the results of speech production and speech perception in this study.…”

“…Using the method of Yamakawa et al [14], Yamakawa and Amano [15] analyzed the Japanese /s/ and / ¶/ pronounced by Japanese and Korean speakers. They obtained the Japanese speakers' production boundary of /s/ and / ¶/ with discriminant analysis with the two variables (i.e., ''rise'' and ''steady+decay'' durations).…”

“…These results indicate that Korean speakers have a different production boundary of /s/ and / ¶/ from Japanese speakers, probably because they pronounce /s/ and / ¶/ by applying Korean consonants. However, Yamakawa and Amano [15] did not examine the perception of /s/ and / ¶/. Because speech perception is strongly related to speech production [16][17][18], the perception of /s/ and / ¶/ may have similar characteristics to their production.…”

“…Because Japanese / ¶/ does not exist in the Korean phoneme system, whereas Japanese /s/ is similar to Korean /s/ or /s à /, one might think that UC would hold for /s/-/ ¶/ perception by Korean speakers. However, the results of a production study of /s/ and / ¶/ [15] suggest that Korean speakers' perception is an extended case of TC assimilation. That is, using the same minimal pair words as the current study, Yamakawa and Amano [15] demonstrated that Korean speakers' pronunciation of Japanese / ¶/ was located in an area that is almost the same as the combined area of Korean /tC/ and /tC à / in the coordinate plane of rise and steady+decay durations.…”