English speakers' discrimination of Korean plain versus aspirated affricates

Abstract

The Korean three-way voicing distinction has been of much interest to phoneticians. Korean obstruents may be plain, tense, or aspirated, which differ in VOT, closure duration, and f0 of vowel onset (Cho et al., 2002; Kim, 1994). Previous research on Korean stops has shown that English speakers perceive all three categories as voiceless in initial position (Shin, 2001). The present study extends this to Korean affricates, which are partly cued by frication duration, an acoustic cue that is distinctive in English for differentiating fricatives from affricates (Repp et al., 1978). Twenty monolingual English speakers participated in the study. The stimuli were six tokens each of the plain and aspirated Korean affricates ([tSa] and [tSha]), naturally produced by a male native speaker of Seoul Korean. Participants completed an AX discrimination task, following five practice trials in which they received feedback on their answers. Results showed very poor discrimination that did not differ from chance (mean d′ = 0.892; p < 0.001). These results indicate that despite the relevance of an additional acoustic cue that is distinctive in English (frication duration), the Korean contrast between plain versus aspirated affricates is difficult for English speakers to discriminate, paralleling previous research on Korean stops.