Diachronic change in perception of Korean sibilants

Abstract

The laryngeal contrast in the Seoul dialect of Korean is in a state of flux: the increasing importance of f0 (relative to VOT) in both perception and production of the three-way stop contrast in younger (vs. older) Seoul speakers has been well-documented. The current work turns to perception of the Korean sibilant series, comprised of a three-way affricate contrast, (fortis vs. lenis vs. aspirated, parallel to the stop contrast) and a phonologically ambiguous two-way fricative contrast (fortis vs. “nonfortis”). We map younger (mean 33 years old) and older (mean 66) Seoul listeners’ perceptual spaces for the sibilant class using a five-way forced-choice task, with stimuli manipulated to vary independently across multiple acoustic dimensions (consonantal spectral information, vocalic spectral information, frication duration, aspiration duration, and f0). Hierarchical classification tree analyses reveal systematic age-related differences in cue-weighting. While both age groups make use of a combination of sp...