A Preliminary Report on Perceptual Resolutions of Korean Consonant Cluster Simplification and Their Possible Change over Time

The present study examined how listeners of Seoul Korean would recover deleted phonemes in consonant cluster simplification. In a phoneme monitoring experiment, listeners had to monitor for C2 (/k/ or /p/) in C1C2C3 when C2 was deleted (C1 was preserved) or preserved (C1 was deleted). The target consonant (C2) was either /k/ or /p/ (e.g., i$\b{lk}$-t${\partial}$lato vs. pa$\b{lp}$-t${\partial}$lato), and there were two listener groups, one group tested in 2002 and the other in 2009. Some points have emerged from the results. First, listeners were able to detect deleted phonemes as accurately and rapidly as preserved phonemes, showing that the physical presence of the acoustic information did not improve the listeners' performance. This suggests that listeners must have relied on language-specific phonological knowledge about the consonant cluster simplification, rather than relying on the low-level acoustic-phonetic information. Second, listener groups (participants in 2002 vs. 2009), differed in processing /p/ versus /k/: listeners in 2009 failed to detect /p/ more frequently than those in 2002, suggesting that the way the consonant cluster sequence is produced and perceived has changed over time. This result was interpreted as coming from statistical patterns of speech production in contemporary Seoul Korean as reported in a recent study by Cho & Kim (2009): /p/ is deleted far more often than /p/ is preserved, which is likely reflected in the way listeners process simplified variants. Finally, listeners processed /k/ more efficiently than /p/, especially when the target was physically present (in C-preserved condition), indicating that listeners benefited more from the presence of /k/ than of /p/. This was interpreted as supporting the view that velars are perceptually more robust than labials, which constrains shaping phonological patterns of the language. These results were then discussed in terms of their implications for theories of spoken word recognition.