Boundary and pitch effects on the perception of Korean alveolar nasal

Abstract

This study investigates alveolar nasal perception on various portions of two Korean [ni] sequences: one [ni] sequence in the suffix medial position of -mnita with L tone and the other [ni] sequence at the IP-final position -ni with H tone. The perception test results show that various portions of [ni] from the suffix-medial position induce significantly more errors than the corresponding portions of [ni] from the IP-final position in all three conditions (vowel, murmur-vowel, and the whole phrase). The test results also show that suffix-medial [ni] sequences of some speakers obtain near-perfect perception scores as [mi], showing that [n] has undergone the categorical change to [m]. This shows that unlike the traditional assumption, Korean may allow progressive place assimilation if the target is the least prominent segment in the environment, like an alveolar nasal [n] in the context of /nasal__i/.