Cue weighting and variability in perception and production.

Abstract

The Korean single liquid phoneme shows an allophonic variation: lateral [l] occurs in coda and tap [r] in onset. Intervocalically, they may appear contrastive as tap or geminate lateral [ll] ([iri] wolf vs [illi] reason), differing in duration and laterality. Kim [(2007)] demonstrated that Korean listeners identified a shortened geminate lateral as geminate /ll/ rather than tap, despite the fact that the duration of edited stimuli was matched for tap. The current study examines whether the weighting of laterality cues over duration cues for [ll] vs [r] is motivated by the native language acoustics. Korean speakers produced 24 Korean words [(C)V_V], containing [ll] or [r] in two speech modes (in a carrier sentence vs in isolation). The duration of [ll] was significantly longer than tap, but it varied greatly depending on the speech mode while tap did not. The intensity of tap was significantly lower than [ll] generally, but it showed a greater variability. However, F3 at the offset of the preceding vowel w...