초록
This paper examines the contribution of vocalic information (after the onset of voicing) to the perception of Korean alveolar stops: the aspirated /$t^{h}$/, the lenis /t/, and the fortis /$t^{*}$/. These stops have been analyzed as differing in VOT (Abramson & Lisker, 1964), the glottal width or aspiration (Kim, 1970), and F0 and intensity build-up (Han & Weitzman, 1970). These studies focused on the articulatory and acoustic qualities of the consonants and often assumed that the consonantal portion before the onset of voicing plays the main role in maintaining the three-way distinction. In contrast, the role of the following vowels was given less attention. In order to investigate the contribution of the following vowels, a perceptual study was conducted using stimuli cross-spliced from three naturally produced syllables [$t^{h}al$] 'mask', [tal] 'moon', and [$t^{*}al$]) 'daughter'. Stimuli were presented to 12 Korean listeners for identification. Each subject responded to a total of 486 tokens. The results show that vowels play the primary role when the cut occurs at the star of voicing. Even with cuts at 10 ms and 40 ms into voicing, the following vowel still plays a clear role. This suggests that vowels carry the important information for distinguishing the three stops.