• Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.131-142
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• 2002

Place assimilation in Korean has been argued to reflect the consonantal strength hierarchy in which velar is stronger than labial which is in turn stronger than coronal. The strength relationship has been manifested in two ways in literature. One is through phonological representation as shown in Iverson and Lee (1994). The other is through perceptual salience ranking as suggested by Jun (1995). The goal of this study is to examine the perceptual salience of placed consonants through an identification experiment. The experiment conducted in this study reveals four facts. First, place identification of a prevocalic consonant is higher than that of a postvocalic one. Second, place identification of a stop in coda is more confusable than that of a nasal counterpart in Korean contrary to other previous studies. Third, velar is most confusable in place identification in contrast to Jun (1995) and Hume et al. (1999). Finally, place perception of consonants can vary depending on adjacent vocalic context. These results suggest that perceptual salience is one of the possibly several factors affecting a phonological process.

• MALSORI
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• no.25_26
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• pp.65-92
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• 1993

Not all linguistic units are of equal importance in the functioning of language. The present study aims to examine He functional load of phonemes in standard Korean, To achieve this goal, B analysed continuous texts selected from the textbooks of elementary school on a personal computer. The total number of syllables studied in this thesis is 101,637. The characteristics of the Korean syllable structures are as follows. 1) In a syllable head, /n/ occurs most frequently. 2) The frequencies of syllables with an onset are much higher than those with no onset ( 85% : 15% ), 3) In a syllable head, obstruents are preferred because their consonantal strength are great, (57%) 4) In a syllable nucleus, /a/ occurs most frequently. 5) The rate of occurrence of the monophthongs is 90.2%, and that of the diphthongs is 9.8%. Especially the three basic vowels(/i,a,u/) occur at the rate of 46.6%. 6) In a syllable coda, /n/ occurs most frequently. 7) The open syllables are favored (open syllable 68.7%, closed syllable 31.3%).