The production and perception of coronal fricatives in Seoul Korean

Abstract

This article presents new data on the contrast between the two voiceless coronal fricatives of Korean, variously described as a lenis/fortis or aspirated/fortis contrast. In utterance-initial position, the fricatives were found to differ in centroid frequency; duration of frication, aspiration, and the following vowel; and several aspects of the following vowel onset, including intensity profile, spectral tilt, and F 1 onset. The between-fricative differences varied across vowel contexts, however, and spectral differences in the vowel onset especially were more pronounced for /a/ than for /i, ɯ, u/. This disparity led to the hypothesis that cues in the following vowel onset would exert a weaker influence on perception for high vowels than for low vowels. Perception data provided general support for this hypothesis, indicating that while vowel onset cues had the largest impact on perception for both high-and low-vowel stimuli, this influence was weaker for high vowels. Perception was also strongly influenced by aspiration duration, with modest contributions from frication duration and f 0 onset. Taken together, these findings suggest that the 'non-fortis' fricative is best characterized not in terms of the lenis or aspirated categories for stops, but in terms of a unique representation that is both lenis and aspirated.

Second Language Experience Can Hinder the Discrimination of Nonnative Phonological Contrasts

“…Tables 2 and 3 (Chang, 2013). Second, all listener groups perceived /s h / and /s*/ as either alveolar or postalveolar in the /a/ and /u/ contexts and as alveolopalatal in the /i/ context.…”

“…There were several 'candidate' categories to which the L2 learner could have rephonologized his or her perception of /s h /. If it were only L2 vocabulary that were pressuring the learner in this domain, we would expect learners to abandon the /s/ percept (since they perceive Korean /s*/ as Mandarin /s/ much more consistently) and attune more to the cue in /s h / that naïve listeners were Holliday already sensitive to (be it aspiration, voice quality, or any other cue discussed in Chang, 2013) that makes it sound like an aspirated affricate. That expectation, however, was not borne out in the results here.…”

“…While many acoustic cues to the Korean /s h /-/s*/ contrast have been suggested (see Chang, 2013, for a review), one cue relevant to the current study is the presence of aspiration in /s h /, which is significantly reduced when followed by a high vowel. This reduction in aspiration, along with changes in other cues, renders /s h / and /s*/ more difficult to correctly identify in high vowel contexts than in low vowel contexts (Holliday, 2014b;Lee and Jongman, 2012).…”

“…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. (Chang, 2013), the naïve Mandarin listeners may have perceived it as one if the aspiration cue was salient enough to outweigh the lack of a delayed release characteristic of affricates (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996, p. 90). Perceptual assimilation differed, however, in high vowel contexts.…”

The perceptual assimilation of Korean obstruents by native Mandarin listeners

“…These obstruents have been extensively studied over the past several decades, and the acoustic correlates of the stops are well understood (Cho et al, 2002;Han and Weitzman, 1970;Kim, 1965;Silva, 2006). Some more recent studies have focused attention on the Korean affricates (Anderson et al, 2004;Kim, 1999) and fricatives (Chang, 2013;Holliday, 2012a;Kim et al, 2010;Yoon, 1999). Few studies, however, have investigated how non-native listeners perceive Korean obstruents (although see Schmidt, 2007), and to our knowledge only Yasuta (2004) has investigated listeners of a nonEnglish L1.…”