• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.51-65
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• 2011

This study attempts to investigate the interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners (ISIB-L), examining Chinese talkers' production of English liquids and its perception of native listeners and non-native Chinese and Korean listeners. An Accent Judgment Task was conducted to measure non-native talkers' and listeners' phonological proficiency, and two levels of proficiency groups (high and low) participated in the experiment. The English liquids /l/ and /r/ produced by Chinese talkers were considered in terms of positions (syllable initial and final), contexts (segment, word and sentence) and lexical density (minimal vs. nonminimal pair) to see if these factors play a role in ISIIB-L. Results showed that both matched and mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for listeners occurred except for the initial /l/. Non-native Chinese and Korean listeners, though only with high proficiency, were more accurate at identifying initial /r/, final /l/ and final /r/, but initial /l/ was significantly more intelligible to native listeners than non-native listeners. There was evidence of contextual and lexical density effects on ISIB-L. No ISIB-L was demonstrated in sentence context, but both matched and mismatched ISIB-L was observed in word context; this finding held true for only high proficiency listeners. Listeners recognized the targets better in the non-minimal pair (sparse density) environment than the minimal pair (higher density) environment. These findings suggest that ISIB-L for English liquids is influenced by talkers' and listeners' proficiency, syllable position in association with L1 and L2 phonological structure, context, and word neighborhood density.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2020

This study investigated whether listeners' perceptual patterns varied according to base token selected for stimuli manipulation. Voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) values were orthogonally manipulated, each in seven steps, using naturally produced words that contained a lenis (/kan/) and an aspirated (/k^han/) stop in Seoul Korean. Both native and non-native groups showed significantly higher numbers of aspirated responses for the stimuli constructed with /k^han/, evidencing the use of minor cues left in the stimuli after manipulation. For the native group the use of the VOT and F0 cues in the stop categorization did not differ depending on whether the base token included the lenis or aspirated stop, indicating that the results of previous studies remain tenable that investigated the relative importance of the acoustic cues in the native listener perception of the Korean stop contrasts by using one base token for manipulating perceptual stimuli. For the non-native group, the use patterns of the F0 cue differed as a function of base token selected. Some findings indicated that listeners used alternative cues to identify the stop contrast when major cues sound ambiguous. The use of the manipulated VOT and F0 cues by the non-native group was not native-like, suggesting that non-native listeners may have perceived the minor cues as stable in the context of the manipulated cue combinations.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.115-124
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• 2010

The current study investigated the role of acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening in lexical segmentation of a non-native language. In a series of cross-modal identity-priming experiments, native Korean listeners heard English auditory stimuli and made lexical decision to visual targets (i.e., written words). The auditory stimuli contained critical two word sequences which created temporal lexical ambiguity (e.g., 'mill#company', with the competitor 'milk'). There was either an IP boundary or a word boundary between the two words in the critical sequences. The initial CV of the second word (e.g., [$k_{\Lambda}$] in 'company') was spliced from another token of the sequence in IP- or Wd-initial positions. The prime words were postboundary words (e.g., company) in Experiment 1, and preboundary words (e.g., mill) in Experiment 2. In both experiments, Korean listeners showed priming effects only in IP contexts, indicating that they can make use of IP boundary cues of English in lexical segmentation of English. The acoustic correlates of domain-initial strengthening were also exploited by Korean listeners, but significant effects were found only for the segmentation of postboundary words. The results therefore indicate that L2 listeners can make use of prosodically driven phonetic detail in lexical segmentation of L2, as long as the direction of those cues are similar in their L1 and L2. The exact use of the cues by Korean listeners was, however, different from that found with native English listeners in Cho, McQueen, and Cox (2007). The differential use of the prosodically driven phonetic cues by the native and non-native listeners are thus discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.117-128
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• 2015

This paper investigates the acoustic-perceptual relation between Korean dent-alveolar fricatives and the English voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in varied prosodic contexts (e.g., stress, accent, and word initial position). The denti-alveolar fricatives in Korean show a two-way distinction, which can be referred to as either plain (lenis) /s/ or fortis /$s^*$/. The English alveolar voiceless fricative /s/ that corresponds to the two Korean fricatives would be placed in a one-to-two non-native phoneme mapping situation when Korean listeners hear English /s/. This raises an interesting question of how the single fricative of English perceptually maps into the two-way distinction in Korean. This paper reports the acoustic-perceptual mapping pattern by investigating spectral properties of the English stimuli that are heard as either /s/ or /$s^*$/ by Korean listeners, in order to answer the two questions: first, how prosody influences fricatives acoustically, and second, how the resultant properties drive non-native listeners to interpret them as segmental features instead of as prosodic information. The results indicate that Korean listeners' responses change depending on the prosodic context in which the stimuli are placed. It implies that Korean speakers interpret some of the information provided by prosody as segmental one, and that the listeners take advantage of the information in their judgment of non-native phonemes.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.87-103
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• 2004

This study investigates Korean listeners' perception of the English stop epenthesis between the sonorant and fricative segments. Specifically this study investigates 1) how often English epenthetic stops are perceived by native Korean listeners, given the fact that Korean does not allow consonant clusters in codas; and 2) whether perception of the epenthetic stops, which are optional phonetic variations, not phonemes, could be improved without any explicit training. 120 English non-words with a mono-syllable structure of CVC1C2, where C1=/m, n, $\eta$, 1/, and C2=/s, $\theta$, $\int$/, were given to two groups of native Korean listeners, and they were asked to detect the target stops such as [p], [t], and [k]. The number of their responses were computed to determine how often listeners succeed in recovering the string of segments produced by the native English speaker. The results of the present study show that English epenthetic stops are poorly identified by native Korean listeners with low English proficiency, even in the case where stimuli with strong acoustic cues are provided with, but perception of epenthetic stops is closely related with listeners' English proficiency, showing the possibility of the improvement of perception. It further shows that perception of epenthetic stops shows asymmetry between coronal and non-coronal consonants.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.17-25
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• 2010

This study explores whether Koreans exploit their native coda-neutralization process when recognizing words in Korean continuous speech. According to the phonological rules in Korean, coda-neutralization process must come before the liaison process, as long as the latter(i.e. liaison process) occurs between 'words', which results in liaison-consonants being coda-neutralized ones such as /b/, /d/, or /g/, rather than non-neutralized ones like /p/, /t/, /k/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/, or /s/. Consequently, if Korean listeners use their native coda-neutralization rules when processing speech input, word recognition will be hampered when non-neutralized consonants precede vowel-initial targets. Word-spotting and word-monitoring tasks were conducted in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. In both experiments, listeners recognized words faster and more accurately when vowel-initial target words were preceded by coda-neutralized consonants than when preceded by coda non-neutralized ones. The results show that Korean listeners exploit the coda-neutralization process when processing their native spoken language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.59-68
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• 2010

This study addresses the issue of whether Korean(L1)-English(L2) non-proficient bilinguals are affected by the native coda-neutralization process when recognizing words in English continuous speech. Korean phonological rules require that if liaison occurs between 'words', then coda-neutralization process must come before the liaison process, which results in liaison-consonants being coda-neutralized ones such as /b/, /d/, or /g/, rather than non-neutralized ones like /p/, /t/, /k/, /$t{\int}$/, /$d_{\Im}$/, or /s/. Consequently, if Korean listeners apply their native coda-neutralization rules to English speech input, word detection will be easier when coda-neutralized consonants precede target words than when non-neutralized ones do. Word-spotting and word-monitoring tasks were used in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. In both experiments, listeners detected words faster and more accurately when vowel-initial target words were preceded by coda-neutralized consonants than when preceded by coda non-neutralized ones. The results show that Korean listeners exploit their native phonological process when processing English, irrespective of whether the native process is appropriate or not.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.59-73
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• 2012

This study attempts to investigate the contribution of prosody to the foreign accent in Chinese speakers' English production by examining the synthesized speech of crossing native and non-native talkers' prosody and segments. For the stimuli of the foreign accent ratings, we transplanted gender-matched native speakers' prosody onto non-native talkers' segments and vice versa, utilizing the TD-PSOLA algorithm. Eight English native listeners participated in judging foreign accent and comprehensibility of the transplanted stimuli. Results showed that the synthesized stimuli were perceived as stronger foreign accent regardless of speakers' proficiency when English speakers' prosody was crossed with Chinese speakers' segments. This suggests that segments contribute more than prosody to native listeners' evaluation of foreign accent. When transplanted with English speakers' segments, Chinese speakers' prosody showed a difference in duration rather than pitch between high and low proficiency such that stronger foreign accent was detected when low proficient Chinese speakers' duration was crossed with English speakers' segments. This indicated that prosody, more specifically duration, plays a role though the prosodic role is not overall as significant as segments. According to the post acoustic analysis, the temporal features contributing to making the duration parameter prominent as opposed to pitch were found out to be speaking rate, pause duration and pause frequency. Finally, foreign accent and comprehensibility showed no significant correlation such that native listeners had no difficulty listening to highly foreign accented speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.89-95
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• 2015

We explored Dutch listeners' perception of Korean three-way contrast of fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops. The three Korean stops are all voiceless word-initially, whereas Dutch distinguishes between voiced and voiceless stops, so Korean voiceless stops were expected to be difficult for the Dutch listeners. Among the three Korean stops, fortis stops are phonetically most similar to Dutch voiceless stops, thus they were expected to be the easiest to distinguish for the Dutch listeners. Dutch and Korean listeners carried out a discrimination task using three crucial comparisons, i.e., fortis-lenis, fortis-aspirated, and lenis-aspirated stops. Results showed that discrimination between lenis and aspirated stops was the most difficult among the three comparisons for both Dutch and Korean listeners. As expected, Dutch listeners discriminated fortis from the other stops relatively accurately. It seems likely that Dutch listeners relied heavily on VOT but less on F0 when discriminating between the three Korean stops.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.337-342
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• 1996

In prevoius works we have repored phonetic similarities between Japanese and Spanish voweis and syiiabic sounds. (1) (2) (3) (4). In the present communication we explore the relative importance of duration of the consonantal segment to elicit Spanish /l/ - /r/ distinction by native j Japanese talkers. Three Argentine and three trained native Japanese talkers recorded /l-r/ combined with /a/ in VCV sequences. Modifications of consonant duration and vowel context with transitions were m made by editing natural /ala/ sounds. Mixed VCV were produced by combining sounds of both languages. Perceptual tests were produced by combining sounds of both languages perceptual performed presenting the speech material, to native t trained and non trained Japanese listeners. In a tirst sessIOn a d discrimination procedure was applied. The items were arranged in pairs a and listeners Nere told to indicate the pair that sounded different. In the f following session they were asked to identify and type the letter corresponding to each one of the items. Responses arc examined in tenns of critical duration of the interval between vowels. Preliminary results indicate that the duration of intervocalic intervais was a relevant cue for the identification of /l/ and /r/. It seems that to differentiate the two sounds, Japanese listeners required relatively longer interval steps than the argentine suhjects. There was a tendency to conhlse more frequently /l/ for /r/ than viceversa.