Identification of the place of articulation of trilingual postvocalic nasals and stops by native speakers of American English, Korean and Japanese.

Abstract

Native speakers of American English and Korean produced postvocalic nasals and stops in /CVC/ frames in which the syllable final segment was a consonant with airstream blocking, and native speakers of Japanese produced more nasal /N/ and obstruent /Q/ in /CVNCV/ and /CVQCV/ frames. In Japanese stimuli, the consonant after the nasal or the obstruent was always a stop. Their utterances were recorded and edited to be used as stimuli for the experiment. The release burst of the English stimuli and the second syllable of Japanese stimuli were deleted. Native speakers of these three languages were recruited as listeners. They identified the place of articulation of the syllable‐final nasals and stops of the three languages. As predicted, Japanese listeners performed most poorly because there are no phonemic contrasts between postvocalic nasals or stops in Japanese. Korean listeners outperformed the other two groups of listeners in identifying the place of articulation. Postvocalic stops in Korean are not released, so the Korean listeners may not depend on the release burst to identify the place of articulation of a syllable final stop. However, they made more voicing errors than American listeners probably because voiced stops in Korean cannot occur in a postvocalic position.