Effects of Inter-phoneme Probabilities on the Acceptability Judgment of Korean CVC Nonwords

Recent experimental studies have shown that language-users' knowledge of the statistical characteristic of their native language plays a key role in their task performance. One specific instance of this that the current study focuses on is the effect of phonotactic probabilities on speakers' wordlikeness judgment of nonwords. In this paper, I explore the question of whether the judgment of Korean speaking subjects as to the wordlikeness of Korean nonsense words is influenced by the degree of association between two-phoneme sequences in Korean. The current results suggest that the objective measure of correlations (expressed by $r_{\phi}$ values) between an onset consonant and a vowel inside Korean syllables play an important role in Korean speakers' nonword processing. The current results additionally indicate an effect of the correlations of two-phoneme sequences including vowels and coda consonants on nonword processing. Implications of these findings for Korean speakers' learning the correlations between adjacent segments inside the syllable are discussed.