The role of gestural overlap in perceptual place assimilation in Korean Minjung Son , Alexei Kochetov and

Opposing views have emerged in phonological and phonetic theory on whether perceptual place assimilation is exclusively attributable to gestural reduction or can be triggered by gestural overlap as well. Specifically, regressive place assimilation in Korean /pk/ clusters has been used as argument for the hypothesis that gestural reduction is uniquely responsible for perceptual place assimilation, yet the empirical evidence for this reduction hypothesis is ambiguous. The present study demonstrates on the basis of articulatory movement data that in these /pk/ clusters the lip gesture for /p/ is either fully present (with varying degrees of overlap) or completely absent. Our data suggest that assimilation in Korean /pk/ clusters is a result of articulatory (not perceptual) place assimilation. To investigate the role of overlap in perceptual place assimilation, the data obtained in the production experiment were used in a phoneme identification experiment with Korean and English listeners. Both subject groups showed that gestural overlap consistently leads to perceptual ambiguity within and between subjects. The results suggest that gestural overlap can be regarded as an important factor in the evolution of language-particular patterns of assimilation.

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