The contribution of consonantal and vocalic information to the perception of Korean initial stops

Abstract In word-initial position, Korean voiceless tense, lax, and aspirated stops differ in acoustic properties that fall within the conventional “consonant” portion, as well as properties falling within the “vowel” portion beginning at voicing onset. Experiment 1 investigated the relative importance of these properties to stop identification by testing Korean listeners' perception of cross-spliced stimuli whose initial consonant portion specified one phonation type and whose vowel portion specified another type. Experiment 2 tested whether the voiced vowel portion alone could cue the phonation type of a deleted initial consonant. The results of both experiments showed that vowel portions from syllables with lax onsets were necessary and largely sufficient to cue lax stops. For vowel portions from syllables with aspirated or tense onsets, the role of vocalic information in stop identification depended on the particular combination of cross-spliced portions (Experiment 1); in the absence of any consonant portion (Experiment 2), both tense and aspirated vowel portions were usually heard as having had tense onsets. The perceptual patterns are interpreted in terms of the acoustic properties of the stimuli. Low vocalic f 0 provided the most salient information for lax stops; tense and aspirated stop identification depended on a combination of VOT, f 0 , and H 1− H 2 characteristics. The perceptual dominance of f 0 over VOT for lax stops is consistent with the size of the f 0 differences in word- (and phrase-) initial position, as well as the prominent role of the resulting tonal patterns in Korean intonational phonology.

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