Korean perception of the Japanese voiceless alveolar fricative /s/

Abstract

Korean voiceless obstruents exhibit a relatively unique phonemic contrast based on laryngeal activity, a three-way tense, lax, and aspirated contrast for stops and affricates and a two-way tense and lax contrast for the alveolar fricative /s/. The relative primacy of various cues to the distinction, particularly for the affricate and fricative contrasts, remains controversial. Patterns in the adaptation of English loanwords have been used to infer the phonological basis for the mapping of English /s/ to Korean, however perception studies have shown that loanword adaptations do not fully account for the synchronic phonological mapping from English loans by Korean native speakers (Schmidt 1996). Mapping from Japanese /s/ to Korean has been much less studied, but according to a loanword study by Ito et al. (2006), Japanese /s/ in word-initial and medial position is consistently mapped to Korean lax /s/, and geminate /s/ is consistently mapped to Korean tense /s*/. However, there appears to have been no comparable perception study to show synchronic mapping by Korean native speakers. The current study undertakes a preliminary evaluation of perceptual mapping of Japanese /s/ to Korean and finds that though the word initial Japanese /s/ conforms to loan-word predictions, word-medial /s/ does not.