• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.21-29
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• 2021

The present study investigated how one's cognitive resources are related to speech perception by examining Korean speakers' executive function (EF) capacity and its association with voice onset time (VOT) and f0 sensitivity in identifying Korean stop laryngeal categories (/t'/ vs. /t/ vs. /t^h/). Previously, Kong et al. (under revision) reported that Korean listeners (N = 154) in Seoul and Changwon (Gyeongsang) showed differential group patterns in dialect-specific cue weightings across educational institutions (college, high school, and elementary school). We follow up this study by further relating their EF control (working memory, mental flexibility, and inhibition) to their speech perception patterns to examine whether better cognitive ability would control attention to multiple acoustic dimensions. Partial correlation analyses revealed that better EFs in Korean listeners were associated with greater sensitivity to available acoustic details and with greater suppression of irrelevant acoustic information across subgroups, although only a small set of EF components turned out to be relevant. Unlike Seoul participants, Gyeongsang listeners' f0 use was not correlated with any EF task scores, reflecting dialect-specific cue primacy using f0 as a secondary cue. The findings confirm the link between speech perception and general cognitive ability, providing experimental evidence from Korean listeners.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.57-63
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• 2009

The two specific research questions pursued in this paper are: (i) how Korean speakers perceive Hindi stops in terms of the three laryngeal categories of Korean stops; (ii) how well Korean speakers do with an ABX perception test that utilizes a total of 52 Hindi minimal pairs where all sounds are identical except for the laryngeal features of a stop in each word. A total of 45 university students participated in this experiment. The results showed that (i) Koreans tended to perceive Hindi voiceless unaspirated stops as Korean fortis ones, voiceless aspirated stops as aspirated ones, voiced stops as lenis ones, and breathy stops as aspirated ones, and (ii) Koreans had difficulty in distinguishing between voiceless aspirated and breathy stops in Hindi.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.3
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• pp.109-117
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• 1998

This paper tests whether the VOT (Voice Onset Time) contributes to the perception of tense and plain stops in Korean in the initial position. Previous studies have yielded opposite results regarding the role of the VOT in the distinction of these two stop categories. One the one hand, Lisker and Abramson (1964), Kim (1965), and Han and Weitzman (1970) suggest that the Korean plain and tense stops exhibit overlapping values of VOT and thus that, unlike many other languages, the VOT fails to serve as a cue to separate these stop categories. On the other hand, Silva (1991, 1992), and Lee (1991, 1994) use similar methods, but find that the VOT serve as the cue. In this study, the differences in the acoustic measurement with respect to the VOT of Korean plain and tense stops in initial prevocalic position will be tested preceptually, in seeking to determine whether these acoustic differences are used by listeners to distinguish these two stop types.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.53-64
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• 2021

It is known that the voicing contrast for Japanese word-initial stops is primarily realized as differences in the voice onset time (VOT). However, recent studies have reported that voiced stops are more often produced with a positive VOT than with a negative VOT among the younger generation nationwide. It is also known that post-stop F0 is associated with the stop contrast, but the degree of F0 use differs from region to region. This study explores whether the difference in post-stop F0 functions as a perceptual cue to the stop contrast along with VOT. Fifty-five college students who are native listeners from four different regions participated in two or three perception tests. The results show that VOT is a primary cue to the voiced-voiceless distinction of word-initial stops, but that the effect of post-stop F0 on the stop contrast is marginal. The post-stop F0 is involved in perception only when VOT is ambiguous, such that a sound with high F0 is more often perceived as a voiceless stop, but not vice versa. The results of this study indicate that the acoustic parameters associated with the stop contrast are not the same in production and perception, and suggest that other factors such as context, which is not an acoustic characteristic, may also be involved in the stop contrast.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.25-31
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• 2024

This study examines the perceptual motivation behind dissimilation. Consistent with previous arguments suggesting that dissimilation originates from perception rather than production (Coetzee, 2005; Kiparsky, 2003; Scheer, 2013), we hypothesized that an oral stop with short of voice onset time (VOT) would be recognized as non-aspirated more often when it is followed by an aspirated stop with a long VOT. This hypothesis was tested through a perception experiment in which 32 Korean listeners made judgments on the first consonant of C₁VC₂V words manipulated with C₁ VOT and C₂ types. The results revealed that aspirated-based C₁ was recognized as aspirated or tense depending on the duration of VOT, while lenis-based C₁ was consistently recognized as lenis. The dissimilatory effect of aspirated C₂ was confirmed as anticipated, and furthermore, tense C₂ increased the ratio of tense responses more than aspirated C₂. These results provide evidence of a perceptual bias against recurrent aspirated stops, which may play a role in activating a dissimilatory rule or constraint in a language. The assimilatory effect of tense C₂ is in consistent with findings indicating that word-initial tensification is facilitated by the following tense stop in Korean (Kang & Oh, 2016; H. Kim, 2016).

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.35-45
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• 2023

Tohoku Japanese is known to have voiced stops without pre-voicing in word-initial position, whereas traditional or conservative Japanese has voiced stops with pre-voicing in the same position. One problem with this devoicing of voiced stops is that it affects the distinction between voiced and voiceless stops because their voice onset time (VOT) values overlap. Previous studies have confirmed that Tohoku speakers use post-stop fundamental frequency (F0) as an acoustic cue along with VOT to avoid overlap. However, the role of post-stop F0 as a perceptual cue in this region has barely been investigated. Therefore, this study explored the role of post-stop F0 in stop voicing perception along with VOT. Several perception tests were conducted using resynthesized stimuli, which were manipulated along a VOT continuum orthogonal to an F0 continuum. The results showed no significant regional difference (Tohoku vs. Chubu) for nonsense words (/ta-da/). However, for meaningful words (/pari/ 'Paris' vs. /bari/ 'Bali,' /piza/ 'pizza' vs. /biza/ 'visa'), a significant word effect was found, and it was confirmed that some listeners utilized the post-stop F0 more consistently and steadily than others. Based on these results, we discuss innovative listeners who may lead the change in the perception of stop voicing.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to investigate Korean native speakers' perception of English sounds according to groupings of phonetic contrasts. The four groupings looked at were vowels, voicing (voiced-unvoiced), fricatives with difference in place of articulation, and other clusters of specific sound contrasts, such as stop-fricatives and liquids. The position of a sound in syllable was also examined. According to the results of ANOVA and a post-hoc analysis, the perception of vowels, in the medial position was different from that of consonants in the initial and final position. Vowels proved to be the most difficult group to perceive correctly. With the consonants, there was not a big difference whether the contrasts came initially or finally. The order of difficulty was liquids, fricatives, stop-fricatives, and finally voicing.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.63-68
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• 2011

This study investigates how Korean students employ acoustic-phonetic cues in perceiving word boundaries of near-homophonous English phrases. For this study, 60 Korean college students participated in the experiment of discriminating word boundaries for 42 pairs of stimuli comprising the allophonic cues of aspiration and glottal stop. Results were analysed in terms of the correctness of responses and the correlation between correctness and confidence. Results showed that stimuli pairs of the glottal stop cue give a higher correctness but those of aspiration a relatively lower correctness. Comparison of the results of this study with those of the previous studies of English and Japanese speakers showed that Korean and Japanese speakers of English give a substantially lower correctness than native speakers of English, while Korean learners of English as a foreign language provide a lower correctness than Japanese speakers of English as a second language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.63-70
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• 2019

This study investigated individual variability of L2 learners' categorical judgments of L2 stops by exploring English learners' perceptual processing of two acoustic cues (voice onset time [VOT] and f0) and working memory capacity as sources of variation. As prior research has reported that English speakers' greater use of the redundant cue f0 was responsible for gradient processing of native stops, we examined whether the same processing characteristics would be observed in L2 learners' perception of Korean stops (/t/-/t^h/). 22 English learners of L2 Korean with a range of L2 proficiency participated in a visual analogue scaling task and demonstrated variable manners of judging the L2 Korean stops: Some were more gradient than others in performing the task. Correlation analysis revealed that L2 learners' categorical responses were modestly related to individuals' utilizations of a primary cue for the stop contrast (VOT for L1 English stops and f0 for L2 Korean stops), and were also related to better working memory capacity. Together, the current experimental evidence demonstrates adult L2 learners' top-down processing of stop consonants where linguistic and cognitive resources are devoted to a process of determining abstract phonemic identity.