Phonological Process and Word Recognition in Continuous Speech: Evidence from Coda-neutralization

음운 현상과 연속 발화에서의 단어 인지 - 종성중화 작용을 중심으로

This study explores whether Koreans exploit their native coda-neutralization process when recognizing words in Korean continuous speech. According to the phonological rules in Korean, coda-neutralization process must come before the liaison process, as long as the latter(i.e. liaison process) occurs between 'words', which results in liaison-consonants being coda-neutralized ones such as /b/, /d/, or /g/, rather than non-neutralized ones like /p/, /t/, /k/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/, or /s/. Consequently, if Korean listeners use their native coda-neutralization rules when processing speech input, word recognition will be hampered when non-neutralized consonants precede vowel-initial targets. Word-spotting and word-monitoring tasks were conducted in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. In both experiments, listeners recognized words faster and more accurately when vowel-initial target words were preceded by coda-neutralized consonants than when preceded by coda non-neutralized ones. The results show that Korean listeners exploit the coda-neutralization process when processing their native spoken language.