• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.11-18
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• 2011

This paper examines the categorical labeling of lexical pitch accent contrasts in North Kyungsang and South Cholla Korean listeners. It focuses specifically on investigating whether the pitch accent perception of adults and children has a dialect-specific effect. To evaluate the development of perceptual identification, slopes, intercepts, and positions at categorical boundaries were computed using a logistic regression function. The results showed that differences in slopes and intercepts were significant between North Kyungsang child and adult listeners, but the same was not the case for the positions at boundaries. As far as South Cholla child and adult listeners were concerned, there was a significant difference in slopes, but not intercepts and positions at boundaries. In the present study, the comparison of intercepts and slopes at the boundaries indicated developmental differences between North Kyungsang adult and child listeners. This improvement in categorical proportion seems to be a result of developmental changes in categorical perception. For South Cholla adult and child listeners, however, perception of the non-native contrast becomes less categorical.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.91-98
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• 2013

This paper investigated Korean prosody as it relates to graded internal structure in an identification function. Within Korean prosody, variants regarded as dialectal variations can appear as different prosodic scales, which contain the range of within-category variations. The current experiment was intended to show how the prosodic scale corresponding to the range of within-category differences relates to f0 contours for speakers of two Korean dialects, North Kyungsang and South Cholla. In an identification task, participants responded by selecting an item from two answer choices. The probability of choosing the correct response from the two choices was computed by a logistic regression analysis using intercepts and slopes. That is, the correct response between two choices was used to show a linear line with an s-shape presentation. In this paper, to investigate the graded internal structure of labeling, 25%, 50%, and 75% of predicted probability were assessed. Listeners from North Kyungsang showed progressive variations, whereas listeners from South Cholla revealed random patterns in the internal structure of the identification function. In this paper, the results were plotted using scatterplot graphs, applying the range of within-category variation and predicted probability obtained from the logistic regression analyses. The scatterplot graphs showed the different degree of the responses for f0 scales (i.e., variations within categories). The results demonstrate that the gradient structures of native pitch accent users become more progressive in response to f0 scales.