Place assimilation and perceptual salience: Korean listeners' perception of English and Korean coda consonants

Abstract

This paper examined Korean listeners'' perceptual patterns of coda consonants in the context of English and Korean place assimilations. This study also investigated whether perceptual salience was affected by assimilation type (i.e., labial place assimilation and velar place assimilation) and coda type (i.e., /t/, /d/, and /n/ in English, and /t/, /n/, /p/, and /m/ in Korean). In a discrimination experiment, English and Korean stimuli involving place assimilation were presented to twenty native-Korean listeners. The same response rates involving a target syllable and a compound word including the target syllable (e.g., gree[n], gree[ŋ] cup in English, and ga[n] ''liver'', ga[ŋ]gineung ''liver function'' in Korean) were analyzed. Results showed considerable perceptual differences between English and Korean stimuli. Korean coda consonants were less distinct than English coda consonants in the context of assimilation. Furthermore, perceptual salience was strongly affected by assimilation type in the Korean stimuli, whereas the effects of coda type were revealed only in the English stimuli. These findings were discussed with respect to absence or presence of a stop release, perceptual salience rankings of coda consonants, and perceptual asymmetry between stops and nasals.