• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.41-58
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• 2003

Coronal/non-coronal asymmetry refers to the typological trend wherein coronals rather than non-coronals are more likely targets in place assimilation. Although the phenomenon has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of unmarkedness in formalistic approaches to sound patterns, the examination of rules and representations cannot answer why there should be such a process in the first place. Furthermore, the motivation of coronal/non-coronal asymmetry has remained controversial to date even in the field of phonetics. The present study investigated the listeners' perception of coronal and non-coronal stops in the context of $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ after critically reviewing the three types of phonetic accounts for coronal/non-coronal asymmetry, i.e., articulatory, perceptual, and gestural overlap accounts. An experiment was conducted to test whether the phenomenon in question may occur, given the listeners' lack of perceptual ability to identify weaker place cues in VC transitions as argued by Ohala (1990), i.e., coronals have weak place cues that cause listeners' misperception. 5pliced nonsense $VC_{1}C_{2}V$ utterances were given to 20 native speakers of English and Korean. Data analysis showed that majority of the subjects reported $C_{2}\;as\;C_{1}$. More importantly, the place of articulation of C1 did not affect the listeners' identification. Compared to non-coronals, coronals did not show a significantly lower rate of correct identifications. This study challenges the view that coronal/non-coronal asymmetry is attributable to the weak place cues of coronals, providing evidence that CV cues are more perceptually salient than VC cues. While perceptual saliency account may explain the frequent occurrence of regressive assimilation across languages, it cannot be extended to coronal/non-coronal asymmetry.

• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.5 s.67
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• pp.351-362
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• 2006

Currently, finding one's way in the underground spaces associated with subway stations in large cities is becoming a serious problem, and an environment that facilitates wayfinding is becoming more important. This study investigated interior treatments that function as visual cues in the subway stations of Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei in order to develop design guidelines that would improve the place-cognition environment. A theoretical study has shown that there are three categories of visual cue for place cognition: marked trails, regional differentiation, and landmarks. The case study showed that marked trails involve treatments like vertical markers, confrontational positioning, and subway color codes. Regional differentiation involves patterns on the floors and walls, and accent colors on the walls and columns. Landmarks include treatments such as super graphics, symbolic features, artistic decoration and special lights. In the cases of Seoul, marked trails and regional differentiation were predominant. In addition, the Olympic symbol 'Hodori' and the ancient Korean character "Hunminjungeum" were used as landmarks. In the cases of Tokyo, regional differentiation predominated over marked trails because of the complexity of the spatial structure and subway line connection system. In the cases of Taipei, simple, unified images predominated, and there was minimal dependence on marked trails and landmarks. The need for regional differentiation was weak, because the stations studied have open structures that guarantee an open field of view. The results of this research could be used as design guidelines, after further experimental verification, that would help to improve the public environment in terms of wayfinding.

• 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.