• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.137-143
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• 2013

Recent investigation of acoustic correlates of Korean stop manner contrasts has reported a diachronic transition in Korean stops: young Seoul speakers are relatively more dependent on the F0 characteristics of the stops than on the VOT characteristics in aspirated and lenis stop distinction. This finding has been examined against tonal dialects of Korean and the results suggested that the speakers of tonal dialects are not sharing the transition. These results also suggested that F0 function for segmental stop classification interferes with the function for lexical tone classification in their tonal speech. The current study investigated these findings in terms of perception. Perceptual behavior of Seoul and Busan speakers of Korean was examined in a comparative manner through the measurement of perceptual cue weight of F0 and VOT in particular. The results from regression and correlation analyses revealed that Busan speakers are closer to older Seoul speakers than to younger Seoul speakers in that the cue weight for VOT and F0 were comparable in the aspirated-lenis stop distinction. This result was in contrast to the perceptual behavior of younger Seoul speakers who showed clear dominance of F0 over VOT for the same distinction. These findings provided perceptual evidence of the dual function of F0 for segmental and lexical distinctions in tonal dialects of Korean.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.3-10
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• 2010

The proposal that a sound change is occurring in Korean stops was evidenced in this study through identification experiments on Korean stops. Perceptual weight of acoustic correlates to Korean stop manner contrast [VOT (Voice Onset Time), H1-H2 (amplitude difference between the first and second harmonics), and F0 (Fundamental frequency)] was examined with re-synthesized /$t^ha$/, /ta/, and /$t^*a$/ syllables for younger and older Seoul speakers of Korean. For the identification of the aspirated and lenis stops, F0 cue weight relative to VOT was greater for the younger listeners than the older listeners. For H1-H2 cue weight, the two listener groups were more or less the same. These findings were parallel to the production differences found in the earlier work of the author. Combined with production differences, these perception differences between younger and older generations of Seoul speakers suggested that there are generational differences in the phonetic targets of Korean aspirated and lenis stops and such differences are realized in the perception of the stops.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.19-24
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• 2022

This study examined which acoustic cue(s) that Korean learners of English give weight to in perceiving English lexical stress. We manipulated segmental and suprasegmental cues in 5 steps in the first and second syllables of an English stress minimal pair "object". A total of 27 subjects (14 native speakers of English and 13 Korean L2 learners) participated in the English stress judgment task. The results revealed that native Korean listeners used the F0 and intensity cues in identifying English stress and weighted vowel quality most strongly, as native English listeners did. These results indicate that Korean learners' experience with these cues in L1 prosody can help them attend to these cues in their L2 perception. However, L2 learners' perceptual attention is not entirely predicted by their linguistic experience with specific acoustic cues in their native language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.9-21
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• 2021

This study investigated whether Korean learners improve acoustic cue weights to identify Korean lenis and aspirated stops in the direction of native values through perception training that focused on contrasting the stops in various phonetic contexts. Nineteen native Chinese learners of Korean and two native Korean instructors for the perception training participated in the experiment. A training group and a non-training group were divided according to pretest results, and only the training group participated in the training for 5 days. To estimate the perceptual weights of the stop cues, a pretest and a posttest were conducted with stimuli whose stop cues (F0 and VOT) were systematically manipulated. Binary logistic regression analyses were performed on each learner's test results to calculate perceptual β coefficients, which estimate the perceptual weights of the acoustic cues used in identifying the stop contrast. The training group showed a statistically significant increase of 0.451 on average in the posttest for the coefficient values of the F0, which is the primary cue for the stop contrast, whereas the non-training group showed an insignificant increase of 0.246. The patterns of change in the F0 use after training varied considerably among individual learners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.33-40
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• 2017

This study aimed to examine how Korean-English bilinguals make use of VOT and F0 cues in perception and production of Korean (lenis vs. aspirated) and English (voiced vs. voiceless) stops. It was explored whether bilinguals with extensive experience living in the U.S. exhibit native-like or interactive patterns in the cue use for both languages. Participants produced monosyllabic word-initial stops within a carrier sentence in each language, and performed forced-choice identification tasks with synthesized stimuli varying in 7 VOT steps and 7 F0 steps with base tokens of /$t^han$/ for Korean and /$t{\ae}n$/ for English. Listeners were required to select either /tan/ or /$t^han$/ for Korean and either /$d{\ae}n$/ or /$t{\ae}n$/ for English. The results from binary logistic regression analyses for each listener indicated that all bilinguals placed greater weight on F0 than VOT when distinguishing between the Korean lenis and aspirated stops, and greater weight on VOT than F0 in distinguishing between the English voiced and voiceless stops. In terms of production, all participants showed remarkably overlapping ranges in the VOT dimension and separating ranges in the F0 dimension for the stop contrast of Korean, while forming overlapping ranges in the F0 dimension and separating ranges in the VOT dimension for the stop contrast of English. These results indicate that the bilinguals with extensive exposure to L2 manage the stop systems of the two languages independently, both in perception and production, employing the opposite cue use for stops in the two languages. It was also found that the absolute beta-coefficient values of the perceptual cues for Korean stops were generally smaller than those for English and those reported in a previous study as for later bilinguals, which may have resulted from Korean not being their dominant language.