• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.455-464
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• 2009

Based on the observation that Korean speakers of English have difficulties in producing English fricatives, a perception experiment was designed to investigate whether Korean speakers also have difficulties perceiving English labial consonants including fricatives. Forty Korean college students were asked to perform a multiple-choice identification test. The consonant perception test consisted of nonce words which contained English labial consonants [p, b, f, v] in 4 different prosodic locations: initial onset position, intervocalic position before stress, intervocalic position after stress, and final coda position. The general perception pattern was that the mean accuracy rates were higher in strong position like CV and VCVV than in weak position like VC and VVCV. The difficulties in perceiving the English targets resulted mainly from bidirectional manner confusion between stop and fricative across all prosodic locations. The other types of misidentification were due to place confusion as well as voicing confusion. Place confusion was generated mostly by the target [f] in all prosodic position due to acoustic properties. Voicing confusion was heavily influenced by prosodic position. The misperception of the participants was accounted for by phonetic properties and/or the participants' native language properties.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.163-175
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• 2008

Twelve Japanese students living in South Korea have been examined for their perceptual identification of an initial consonant in Korean syllables with or without a white noise. A confusion matrix was then subject to analyses of additive clustering, individual difference scaling, and probability of information transmission, the results of which were also compared to those of South Koreans. The Japanese in the present experiment confused /다/and/타/ most frequently, followed by /가/ and /카/, /자, 차, 짜/, /타/ and /따/, and so on. The results of additive clustering analysis of the Japanese significantly differed from those of the South Koreans. Individual difference scaling revealed dimensions of sonorant, aspiration and coronal. While South Koreans showed binary values on aspiration and tenseness dimensions, the Japanese did continuous values on such dimensions. An information transmission probability analysis revealed that the Japanese participants could not perceive very well such larynx features as tenseness and aspiration compared to the South Korean participants. The former group, however, perceived very well place of articulation features such as labial and coronal. The present results suggest that an approach dealing with structures of base representations is important in understanding the phonological categories of languages.

• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.227-232
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• 2014

The aim of this study was to investigate phoneme recognition in postlingually deafened adults with cochlear implantation. 21-cochlear implantee were participated. They was used cochlear implants more than 1 year. In order to measure consonant performance abilities, subjects were asked for 18 items of Korean consonants in a "aCa" condition with audition alone. The scores ranged from 11 to 86 ($60{\pm}17$)%. The consonant performance abilities correlated with implanted hearing threshold level, significantly (p<.046). This results suggest that consonant performance abilities of postlingual deafened adults cochlear implantee be important for implanted hearing. They had higher correct rates for fricatives and affricatives with distinctive frequency bands than for plosives, liquids & nasals with the same or adjacent frequency bands. All subjects had confusion patterns among the consonants of the same manner of articulation. The reason of consonant confusions was caused that they couldn't recognize different intensities and durations of consonants with the same or adjacent frequency bands.