Perception of the Turkish Consonants by Korean Speakers

Abstract

Turkish and Korean, both belong to Altaic language family, share many common features, i.e. word order, agglutinative structure, etc. When both languages are compared phonologically it will be seen that there are significant differences between them. Unlike the Turkish stops, Korean stops are typologically unusual in that they have a threeway contrast, but they are all voiceless in word final position. They are all voiceless in word-initial position. Korean has also the lax-tense fricative pairs: /s/ and /s’/. Moreover, the lateral consonant /l/ in Korean is pronounced in two different ways, depending on where it appears within the words. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Korean speakers who don't know any Turkish knowledge perceive Turkish consonants. The present study demonstrates that the perception of Turkish consonants by Korean learners is influenced by the phonological properties of Korean. The perception of the Turkish stops by Korean speakers must be related with the different VOT values in both languages. The Turkish consonants which Korean doesn't have were replaced by the nearest convenient sounds. Since the consonants /r/ and /l/ are not independent phonemes in Korean, especially the perception of Turkish word initial and word final /r/ is realized as /l/. Because two languages have nasal consonants, the perception of these sounds are perfectly clear in word initial, word medial and word final positions. The nasal consonants /m/ and /n/ in Turkish and Korean are common.