An Investigation of the Perception of Korean Stops and Fricatives as a Function of Prosodic Conditions

Abstract

This study investigates how the prosodically conditioned phonetic properties from different prosodic levels and word types affect the perception of Korean alveolar stops and fricatives. In the perception study, the identification of the Korean stops (/t/, /tʰ/, /t’/) and the fricatives (/s/, /s’/) was examined across IP-initial, PP-initial, and Wd-initial positions in real and nonsense words. For the lenis and aspirated stops, and the lenis fricative, the CVs taken from the Wd-initial position caused more error rates in the identification of the target segments placed in the IP-initial and PP-initial positions. Also with the lenis stop, listeners showed greater error rates in identifying CVs from the IP-initial position when the CVs were placed in the PP-initial and Wd-initial positions. This error pattern was not found for the fortis stop and the fortis fricative.