• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.455-464
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• 2009

Based on the observation that Korean speakers of English have difficulties in producing English fricatives, a perception experiment was designed to investigate whether Korean speakers also have difficulties perceiving English labial consonants including fricatives. Forty Korean college students were asked to perform a multiple-choice identification test. The consonant perception test consisted of nonce words which contained English labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The general perception pattern was that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV. The difficulties in perceiving the English targets resulted mainly from bidirectional manner confusion between stop and fricative across all prosodic locations. The other types of misidentification were due to place confusion as well as voicing confusion. Place confusion was generated mostly by the target [f] in all prosodic position due to acoustic properties. Voicing confusion was heavily influenced by prosodic position. The misperception of the participants was accounted for by phonetic properties and/or the participants' native language properties.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.186-191
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The overall result showed that the proportion of perception accuracy of the target consonants was rather low, amounting to only 55%. There was also a positional effect since the accuracy rates for perceiving the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate of the target consonant identification was higher in intervocalic position before stress (70%) and initial onset position (67%) than in intervocalic position after stress (45%) and final coda position (36%). Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except intervocalic position after stress. The perception patterns were accounted for by the markedness and perceptual factors in conjunction with stress location.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.788-791
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• 2006

The perception of English labial consonants was investigated via experiment where 40 Korean EFL learners identified nonwords with the target labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations. The results showed that there was a strong positional effect since the accuracy rates of the four target consonants differed by position. Specifically, the average accuracy rate for the target consonants was higher in the stressed intervocalic position and initial onset position than in the unstressed intervocalic position and final coda position. Further, the accuracy rate for [f] is was high in all prosodic locations except the unstressed intervocalic position. This is unexpected in markedness theory given that fricatives are assumed to be more difficult to learn than stops.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.27-33
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• 2011

This paper explores two articulatory characteristics of inter-consonantal coordination observed in lingual-lingual (/kt/, /ks/) and labial-lingual (/pt/) sequences. Using electromagnetic articulometry (EMMA), temporal aspects of the lip movement and lingual movement (of the tongue tip and the tongue dorsum) were examined. Three sequences (/ks/, /kt/, /pt/) were investigated in two respects: gestural overlap in C1C2 and formation duration of coronals in C2 (/t/ or /s/). Results are summarized as follows. First, in a sequence of two stop consonants gestural overlap did not vary with order contrast or a low-level motor constraint on lingual articulators. Gestural overlap between two stop consonants was similar in both /kt/ (lingual-lingual; back-to-front) and /pt/ (labial-lingual; front-to-back). Second, gestural overlap was not simply constrained by place of articulation. Two coronals (/s/ and /t/) shared the same articulator, the tongue tip, but they showed a distinctive gestural overlap pattern with respect to /k/ in C1 (/ks/ (less overlap) < /kt/ (more overlap)). Third, temporal duration of the tongue tip gesture varied as a function of manner of articulation of the target segment in C2 (/ks/ (shorter) < /kt/ (longer)) as well as a function of place of articulation of the segmental context in C1 (/pt/ (shorter) < /kt/ (longer)). There are several implications associated with the results from Korean non-assimilating contexts. First, Korean can be better explained in the way of its language-specific gestural pattern; gestural overlap in Korean is not simply attributed to order contrast (front-to-back vs. back-to-front) or a physiological motor constraint on lingual articulators (lingual-lingual vs. nonlingual-lingual). Taking all factors into consideration, inter-gestural coordination is influenced not only by C1 (place of articulation) but also C2 (manner of articulation). Second, the jaw articulator could have been a factor behind a distinctive gestural overlap pattern in different C1C2 sequences (/ks/ (less overlap) vs. /kt/ and /pt/ (more overlap)). A language-specific gestural pattern occurred with reference to a physiological motor constraint on the jaw articulator.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.206-206
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• 1996

Previous studies of American English(e.g. Sussman 1991, 1993, 1994) CVC coarticulation with initial consonants representing the labial, alveolar, and velar showed a linear relationship that fits to data points formed by plotting onsets of F2 transition along the y-axis and their corresponding midvowel points along the x-axis. The present study extends the locus equation metric to include the following places of articulation:uvular, pharyngeal, laryngeal, and emphatics. The question of interest is to determine if locus equation could serve as phonetic descriptor for the place of articulation in Arabic. Five male native speakers of Colloquial Egyptian Arabic(CEA) read a list of 204 CVC and CVCC words, containing eight different places of articulation and eight vowels. Average of formant patterns(Fl,F2,F3) onsets, midpoints, and offsets were calculated, using wide band spectrograms obtained by means of the kay spectrograph model(7029), and plotted as locus equations. A summary of the acoustic properties of the place of articulation of CEA will be presented in the frames of bVC and CVb. Strong linear regression relationships were found for every place of articulation.