• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제2권3호
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• pp.81-89
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• 2010

Korean and three other languages (English, Arabic, and Japanese) were compared with regard to the compensatory movements in a VC (Vowel and Consonant) sequence and word. For this, Korean data were collected from an experiment and the other languages' data from literature. All the test words of the languages had the same syllabic contexture, i.e., /CVCV(r)/, where C was an oral stop and intervocalic consonants were either bilabial or alveolar stops. The present study found that (1) Korean is most striking in the durational variations of segments (vowel and the following hetero-syllabic consonant); (2) unlike the three languages that show a constant sum of VC, Korean yields a three-way distinction in the length of VC according the type (lax unaspirated vs. tense unaspirated vs. tense aspirated) of the following stop consonant; (3) a durational constancy is maintained up to the word level in the three languages, but Korean word duration varies as a function of the feature tenseness of the intervocalic consonants; (4) consonant duration is proven to differentiate Korean the most from the other languages. It is suggested that the durational difference between a lax consonant and its tense cognate(s) and the degree of compensation between V and C are determined by the phonology in each language.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권3호
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• pp.57-65
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• 2017

The current study explored how Korean-speaking children processed the multiple acoustic cues (VOT and f0) for the stop laryngeal contrast (/t'/, /t/, and /$t^h$/) and examined whether individual perceptual strategies could be related to a general cognitive ability performing executive functions (EF). 15 children (aged from 7 to 8) participated in the speech perception task identifying the three Korean laryngeal stops (3AFC) on listening to the auditory stimuli of C-/a/ with synthetically varying VOT and f0. They completed a series of EF tasks to measure working memory, inhibition, and cognitive shifting ability. The findings showed that children used the two cues in a highly correlated manner. While children utilized VOT consistently for the three laryngeal categories, their use of f0 was either reduced or enhanced depending on the phonetic categories. Importantly, the children's processing strategies of a f0 suppression for a tense-aspirated contrast were meaningfully associated with children's better cognitive abilities such as working memory, inhibition, and attentional shifting. As a preliminary experimental investigation, the current research demonstrated that listeners with inefficient processing strategies were poor at the EF skills, suggesting that cognitive skills might be responsible for developmental variations of processing sub-phonemic information for the linguistic contrast.