Affricate-fricative perception in Korean listeners: Evidence for universal and language specific biases

Abstract

Although language experience has a profound impact on phonetic perception, there is increasing evidence that phonetic perception is also shaped by universal biases which can be revealed as asymmetries in discrimination performance. In the present study, we explore potential perceptual asymmetries in adult Korean perception of four English affricate-fricative contrasts. Korean adults completed a native-language assimilation task and a category-based AX discrimination task with the phonemic contrast /tʃa-sa/ and non-phonemic contrasts /tʃa-ʃa/, /dʒa-za/ and /dʒa-ʒa/. Both voiceless contrasts—/tʃa-sa/ and /tʃa-ʃa/—were assimilated to distinct Korean affricate and fricative categories and were discriminated very well (>90%); performance revealed no perceptual asymmetries. Both voiced contrasts—/dʒa-za/ and /dʒa-ʒa/—were assimilated to the same Korean affricate category (/tʃa/) and were poorly discriminated (63-65%); performance was asymmetric on different pairs for both contrasts (fricative-affricate pairs>af...