• Speech Sciences
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• v.3
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• pp.71-82
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• 1998

Five sets of nonsense acoustical stimuli {$[sp{\varepsilon},st{\varepsilon},sk{\varepsilon}],\;[p{\varepsilon},t{\varepsilon},k{\varepsilon}],\;[sb{\varepsilon},sd{\varepsilon},sg{\varepsilon}],\;[b{\varepsilon},d{\varepsilon},g{\varepsilon}],\;['{\varepsilon}b{\varepsilon},'{\varepsilon}d{\varepsilon},'{\varepsilon}g{\varepsilon}]$} were presented for identification of English stops to native speakers of English, Chinese, and Korean. The English speakers perceived stops after /s/ as /p, t, k/; in other contexts as /b, d, g/. In the languages where other distinctions exist, however, the evaluation was different. The results suggest that in English the cue for stops after /s/ was syllable structure constraint: After initial /s/ always /p, t, k/ follow; the cue for the initial stops was aspiration. On the basis of the results, it was concluded that in English we should classify the unaspirated voiceless stops in initial /s/-stop clusters into the phoneme where [$p^{h},t^{h},k^{h}$] are in, and that perception is not only language specific but also context specific.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.11-20
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to compare the acoustic parameters of English stop consonants at the initial and after-initial-/s/ positions in a message produced by 47 Korean and American speakers in order to provide better pronunciation skills of English stops for Korean learners. A Praat script was developed to obtain voice onset time (VOT), maximum consonant intensity (maxCi), and rate of rise (ROR) from six target words with stops at the positions in the message. Results show that VOT and maxCi were significantly different between the two language groups while ROR wasn't. The Korean speakers generally produced the stop consonants with longer VOTs and higher consonant intensity. From the comparison of consonant groups at the two different positions, the Korean participants did not distinguish them as clearly as the American participants did at the after-initial-/s/ position. Finally a comparison of each language and sex group revealed that the major difference was attributed to stop consonants in the after-/s/ position. The author concluded that Korean speakers should be careful not to produce all the stops with longer VOTs and higher intensity. Further studies would be desirable to examine how Americans evaluate Korean speakers' English proficiency with modified acoustic values of English stops.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.71-87
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• 2004

Korean has a pair of voiceless fricatives, whose laryngeal manifestation comes in parallel to stops and affricates with a three-way lexical contrast. Prior phonetic studies by Kagaya (1974), Iverson (1983), and Kang (1999, 2000) point out /s/ is associated with multiple characteristics of the larynx shared with not only the lax but also the aspirated series, whereas /s' / carries a laryngeal distinction typical of the tense consonants. The complex dual nature of /s/ is again supported by a psycholinguistic study by Kang (2004), as /s/ was found to interact with /$c^h$/ (17% of the time) as well as /c/ (57%) in speech errors. In addition, a recent work by Cho and Lee (2003) notes an interesting chain shift case in the acquisition of the fricatives. Although they observed a significant phonological pattern between child English and Korean, Cho and Lee's description of acquiring fricatives is far from being precise from the perspective of phonetics. From a longitudinal study of recorded tapes by two children at 1;7-3;8 and 1;7-2;1 respectively, I found that /s' / was usually substituted into tense noncontinuants in young children's early production as predicted, whereas /s/ having both lax and aspirated-like glottal properties revealed a complicated pattern of substitutions into lax, tense, and aspirated noncontinuants with a varying degree of preference relative to the subjects. The current acquisition study supports the previous claims concerning fricatives in other languages, showing that their acquisition comes after stops. Besides, it also notes that Korean fricatives are subject to a series of phonological processes called stopping, affricating, tensifying and palatalizing during the transitional period of phonological development by young children. Moreover, between the two voiceless types, /s/ was acquired earlier than /s'/ as the unmarked segment.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.9-21
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• 2021

This study investigated whether Korean learners improve acoustic cue weights to identify Korean lenis and aspirated stops in the direction of native values through perception training that focused on contrasting the stops in various phonetic contexts. Nineteen native Chinese learners of Korean and two native Korean instructors for the perception training participated in the experiment. A training group and a non-training group were divided according to pretest results, and only the training group participated in the training for 5 days. To estimate the perceptual weights of the stop cues, a pretest and a posttest were conducted with stimuli whose stop cues (F0 and VOT) were systematically manipulated. Binary logistic regression analyses were performed on each learner's test results to calculate perceptual β coefficients, which estimate the perceptual weights of the acoustic cues used in identifying the stop contrast. The training group showed a statistically significant increase of 0.451 on average in the posttest for the coefficient values of the F0, which is the primary cue for the stop contrast, whereas the non-training group showed an insignificant increase of 0.246. The patterns of change in the F0 use after training varied considerably among individual learners.