The perceptual assimilation of Korean obstruents by native Mandarin listeners

Abstract

The current study reports the results of a perception experiment in which 20 naive native Mandarin listeners classified and rated the goodness of Korean stops /p, t, k, p(h), t(h), k(h), p*, t*, k*/, affricates /tɕ, tɕ*, tɕ(h)/, and fricatives /s(h), s*/ in terms of Mandarin segmental categories. It was found that listeners were sensitive to the voice onset time dimension of Korean stops and the presence of aspiration in Korean affricates, but Korean lenis and aspirated obstruents were generally assimilated to a single Mandarin category because the f0 cue differentiating them is not relevant to any Mandarin segmental contrast. The affricates were perceived as alveolopalatal and postalveolar more often than alveolar. The perception of fricatives was strongly influenced by vowel context, as the two fricatives were often perceived as different categories before /a/, but as the same category more often before /i/ and /u/. The results for the affricates and fricatives may be partly explained by Mandarin phonotactic constraints that prohibit alveolar and postalveolar consonants before /i/ and alveolopalatal consonants before /a/ or /u/.

Second Language Experience Can Hinder the Discrimination of Nonnative Phonological Contrasts

“…This result for the NM group replicates Holliday (2014a), who found that /s h / in the /a/ context was perceived as an aspirated affricate in 73% of trials. To further investigate whether the 3 groups here perceived aspiration in the stimuli differently, each response was coded as either aspirated or unaspirated based on the Mandarin category chosen as most similar to the stimulus.…”

“…It was expected that either the second or the third hypothesis would be supported, although if the results supported the second hypothesis it would need to be explained why the L2 learners were unable to map the acoustic cues to the /s h /-/s*/ contrast onto the appropriate category labels. The third hypothesis represented the most straightforward explanation of Holliday (2014a) and Holliday (2014b). In addition, the current study also tested the /s h /-/s*/ identification accuracy of novice and advanced L1 Mandarin learners of Korean using CVs produced in isolation, to see whether the poor performance of the L1 Mandarin listeners in Holliday (2014b) could have been because the stimuli were CVs extracted from longer words.…”

“…It is similar to Mandarin /s/ in that both sounds are dentialveolar sibilant fricatives, but it is also similar to Mandarin /ʦ h / in that both are dentialveolar aspirated sibilants. Just as Levy (2009b) found that the perceptual assimilation of French /y/ by naïve English listeners varied according to consonantal context, Holliday (2014a) found that the perceptual assimilation of Korean /s h / and /s*/ by naïve Mandarin listeners varied 1 While this last sibilant fricative is often described as 'retrofl ex', articulatory studies of Mandarin sibilants have not shown that it is actually articulated as such (Ladefoged and Wu, 1984;Lee, 1999;Toda and Honda, 2003). In this paper, it will be transcribed as postalveolar /ʃ/, although it should be noted that this is not to claim that it is identical to English palatoalveolar /ʃ/, which is transcribed in the same way.…”

“…Holliday and 2 alveolar stops (/t/, /t h /). The choices were limited to just these 11 to keep the task as simple as possible, and because previous work has shown that Korean sibilant fricatives and affricates are rarely perceived as anything noncoronal by L1 Mandarin listeners (Holliday, 2014a). For each trial, after choosing a Mandarin category, the listener gave a rating of how similar the stimulus sounded to the chosen Mandarin category.…”

“…According to PAM (Best, 1995), then, the results of Holliday (2014a) predict that naïve Mandarin listeners should be reasonably accurate at discriminating between /s h a/ and /s*a/, and less accurate at discriminating between /s h i/ and /s*i/, and between /s h u/ and /s*u/. By extension, we might expect L1 Mandarin learners of Korean to also be more accurate at the discrimination and classification of Korean /s h /-/s*/ before /a/ than before /i/ or /u/.…”