Korean Lenis Research Articles

능숙도에 따른 한국어 폐쇄음 발화 양상 연구

This study explores whether Korean proficiency plays a crucial role in producing Korean stops regarding VOT and F0. It also investigates the cardinal factor that Korean learners distinguish Korean lenis, aspirated, and tense stops. Ten Korean speakers and twenty Korean learners of various nationalities participated in the phonetic experiment. The learners were assigned to advanced and elementary-proficiency groups. The findings reveal that learners’ proficiency levels did not play a large role in acquiring Korean stops in terms of VOT and F0. This study also indicates that Korean speakers used F0 distinguishing aspirated, lenis, and tense stops but learners used VOT showing longer aspirated VOT. Regarding F0, advanced learners displayed no gap among the stops, and the elementary group showed a significant difference between lenis and aspirated F0, although the aspect was not similar to the Korean group. Based on the results, this study suggests that Korean proficiency cannot be an indicator of pronunciation proficiency. Other factors such as LOR, input, motivation, and attitude should be considered regarding utterance research in the target language acquisition.

Kimchi or gimchi? Perceived similarity between Korean lenis and Japanese voiced/voiceless stop sounds

When distinguishing stop consonants, Korean listeners use the fundamental frequency of the following vowel (F0) as well as the voice onset time (VOT). However, it is unclear whether the F0 and VOT of natural speech sounds play an effective role in hearing nonnative stops. In the present study, we examined whether Korean listeners perceive Japanese voiced stops, rather than Japanese voiceless stops, as being similar to Korean lenis stops depending on F0 and VOT. Native Korean listeners matched a speech sound starting with either a Japanese voiced or voiceless stop to a target. The targets were meaningful visual words starting with a lenis stop in Experiment 1 and meaningless speech sounds starting with a lenis stop in Experiment 2. Native Japanese listeners, who primarily use VOT for stop distinction, also participated in Experiment 2. The results revealed that the extent to which Korean listeners chose voiced stops was influenced consistently by F0, and the pattern of results differed between Korean and Japanese listeners. These findings suggest that even when hearing natural speech sounds, Korean listeners use F0 when judging the similarity between lenis and nonnative stops.

Crosslinguistic differences in cue primacy affect bilinguals' discrimination performance

Onset f0 – pitch at the onset of the vowel following the consonant – is an important cue to laryngeal stop distinctions in Korean, especially the lenis-aspirated contrast, while in English onset f0 plays only a secondary role in distinguishing voiced and voiceless stops. The current study investigates to what extent Korean heritage speakers (n = 29) who are English dominant can perceptually discriminate Korean lenis and aspirated stops differing acoustically only in terms of onset f0, but not in terms of VOT. Heritage speakers’ performance is compared to that of Korean-immersed native speakers as a control group (n = 29). We hypothesized that heritage speakers would experience more difficulty than Korean-immersed speakers in using onset f0 as the sole cue to laryngeal contrast, due to the influence from English, where VOT dominates onset f0 as a cue to voicing. The results of a mixed-effects logistic regression model confirmed that heritage speakers were less accurate in the lenis-aspirated discrimination task than Korean-immersed speakers, providing support to the hypothesis that bilinguals’ perception of their first language speech can be subject to crosslinguistic influence from their second language.

Korean listeners’ identification and discrimination of lengthened /s/ as prolongations

ABSTRACT This study aimed to examine Korean listeners’ judgement of sound duration as prolongation and the mode of perceiving prolongation, whether discrete or continuous. A total of 75 Korean undergraduate students listened to the Korean segment /s/, each of which was lengthened by 0–380 ms (ranging from the original 205 to 585 ms) in 20-ms increments. Then, the participants were asked to complete two different primary tasks: determine whether the sound was normal (0) or abnormal (1) and rate each version of the sound based on a rating of 1 to 100 (the closer to 100, the less fluent). The minimum duration for the Korean sound to be perceived as abnormally prolonged was calculated by analysing the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves using Youden’s index. To examine whether listeners perceived durational variations for the fricative segment discretely or continuously, a curve was estimated using the best fitting regression model for the observed data with the highest adjusted R-squared value. The minimum duration identified as abnormal prolongation for the Korean lenis fricative /s/ was 375 ms, corresponding to 182.9% of the original, unaltered sound’s length. The mode of perceiving durational variations for the segment was continuous (or gradient) rather than discrete. No gender difference was found in the minimum durational threshold and the mode of perceiving prolongation. The findings of this study were further discussed in relation to the existing body of research, and some clinical implications for the assessment of stuttering were also presented.

Crosslinguistic Influence in the Discrimination of Korean Stop Contrast by Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners

The present study examines the extent of crosslinguistic influence from English as a dominant language in the perception of the Korean lenis–aspirated contrast among Korean heritage speakers in the United States (N = 20) and English-speaking learners of Korean as a second language (N = 20), as compared to native speakers of Korean immersed in the first language environment (N = 20), by using an AX discrimination task. In addition, we sought to determine whether significant dependencies could be observed between participants’ linguistic background and experiences and their perceptual accuracy in the discrimination task. Results of a mixed-effects logistic regression model demonstrated that heritage speakers outperformed second language learners with 85% vs. 63% accurate discrimination, while no significant difference was detected between heritage speakers and first language-immersed native speakers (85% vs. 88% correct). Furthermore, higher verbal fluency was significantly predictive of greater perceptual accuracy for the heritage speakers. The results are compatible with the interpretation that the influence of English on the discrimination of the Korean laryngeal contrast was stronger for second language learners of Korean than for heritage speakers, while heritage speakers were not apparently affected by dominance in English in their discrimination of Korean lenis and aspirated stops.

지각 훈련을 통한 한국어 폐쇄음 음향 신호 가중치의 L2 학습

This study investigated whether Korean learners improve acoustic cue weights to identify Korean lenis and aspirated stops in the direction of native values through perception training that focused on contrasting the stops in various phonetic contexts. Nineteen native Chinese learners of Korean and two native Korean instructors for the perception training participated in the experiment. A training group and a non-training group were divided according to pretest results, and only the training group participated in the training for 5 days. To estimate the perceptual weights of the stop cues, a pretest and a posttest were conducted with stimuli whose stop cues (F0 and VOT) were systematically manipulated. Binary logistic regression analyses were performed on each learner

음 변화 관점에서 바라본 한국어 어두 폐쇄음의 발화 및 지각

Based on spontaneous speech data collected in 2020, this study examined the production and perception of Korean lenis, aspirated, and fortis stops. Unlike the controlled experiments of previous studies, lenis and aspirated stops of males in their 30s were not distinguished by voice onset time (VOT) in spontaneous speech. Perceptual experiments were conducted on young females, the leaders of language change. F0 was found to serve as the primary cue for the perception of lenis stops, and then VOT distinguished the aspirated and fortis stops. The fact that the sounds were always perceived as lenis stops when F0 was low, irrespective of whether VOT was short or long, showed that F0 plays an absolute role in the perception of lenis stops. However, in some cases the aspirated and lenis stops were distinguished only by VOT, which does not happen in production. In terms of sound change, disagreement between production and perception systems occurs when sound change is in progress. In particular, when production change precedes perception change, it indicates that the sound change is in its latter stages. Young females still maintain the previous system in perception because the distinction of lenis and aspirated stops by VOT was valid in their parents’ generation. In other words, VOT is still used for perception to communicate with other groups.

Tone-induced split in stop category mapping by Korean learners of Mandarin Chinese

AbstractThe present study reports a novel case where a simple one-to-one category mapping may develop into a systematic one-to-two mapping over the course of second language acquisition. We examined the split in category mapping of the Mandarin unaspirated stops conditioned by tone by Korean-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese (e.g. Mandarin /ta35/ to Korean lenis [ta] vs. Mandarin /ta55/ to Korean fortis [t’a]). Korean L2 learners and naïve listeners participated in identification tasks in whichf0contours of Mandarin words containing unaspirated stops with short-lag VOTs were digitally manipulated. In word-initial position, learners showed a near-categorical perception from lenis to fortis asf0increased, while most stimuli were identified as fortis by naïve listeners. The effect off0was much smaller in word-medial position, but the group difference remained the same, confirming the two groups’ differential use of phonetic cues for stop identification. Taken together, a substantial reorganization of perceptual cues, namely the promotion off0concurrent with significant underweighting of VOT cues, seems to have taken place during L2 acquisition. The findings were discussed with reference to PAM-L2 whereby the knowledge of the L2 phonological system along with particular phonetic properties of the L2 sounds may have driven a perceptual regrouping of the L2 stop categories.

Processing prosodically driven variations in lexical access

This study investigates whether prosodically driven variants constrain lexical access by focusing on the processing of prosodically licit and illicit Korean lenis plosives and nasals. Lenis plosives are aspirated phrase-initially but voiced phrase-medially; nasals undergo nasal weakening (“denasalization”) phrase-initially but not phrase-medially. Importantly, denasalized nasals share acoustic similarities with voiced lenis plosives. Seoul Korean listeners completed four cross-modal priming experiments where primes in phrase-initial sentential position were related (experimental) (e.g., /tapal/ “bundle”) or unrelated (control) (e.g., /tʃodɛ/ “invitation”) to visual targets (e.g., 다발/tapal/). The target began with a lenis plosive (Exps. 1 and 2) or nasal (Exps. 3 and 4). The experimental prime began with a prosodically licit (Exp. 1: aspirated lenis, Exp. 3: denasalized nasal) or illicit (Exp. 2: voiced lenis, Exp. 4: nasalized nasal) variant. The results showed that experimental primes with a prosodically licit variant (Exps. 1 and 3) facilitated word recognition. For prosodically illicit variants, experimental primes with a nasalized nasal (Exp. 4) facilitated word recognition but experimental primes with a voiced plosive did not (Exp. 2). The facilitation in Exp. 4 suggests that prosodically driven variants do not constrain lexical access; the lack of facilitation in Exp. 2 is attributed to lexical competition from nasal-initial words.This study investigates whether prosodically driven variants constrain lexical access by focusing on the processing of prosodically licit and illicit Korean lenis plosives and nasals. Lenis plosives are aspirated phrase-initially but voiced phrase-medially; nasals undergo nasal weakening (“denasalization”) phrase-initially but not phrase-medially. Importantly, denasalized nasals share acoustic similarities with voiced lenis plosives. Seoul Korean listeners completed four cross-modal priming experiments where primes in phrase-initial sentential position were related (experimental) (e.g., /tapal/ “bundle”) or unrelated (control) (e.g., /tʃodɛ/ “invitation”) to visual targets (e.g., 다발/tapal/). The target began with a lenis plosive (Exps. 1 and 2) or nasal (Exps. 3 and 4). The experimental prime began with a prosodically licit (Exp. 1: aspirated lenis, Exp. 3: denasalized nasal) or illicit (Exp. 2: voiced lenis, Exp. 4: nasalized nasal) variant. The results showed that experimental primes with a prosodically...

The Perception and Production of Word-Initial Korean Stops by Native Speakers of Japanese.

Previous studies have shown that non-native speakers of Korean not only have difficulty producing the word-initial three-way stop contrast, but also exhibit a wide range of production patterns. Because these studies have only investigated native (L1) speakers of English and Mandarin and given the overall paucity of research on non-native Korean, it is not yet clear how dependent these findings are on the particular native language under investigation. The current paper reinforces our empirical grounding via extension to L1 speakers of Japanese. It is shown that although naïve Japanese listeners consistently perceive Korean fortis stops as voiced, and Korean lenis and aspirated stops as voiceless, novice second language learners do not produce any significant difference among the three stop categories, despite producing clear differences between their native Japanese stop categories. Unlike in previous studies of L1 speakers of English and Mandarin, there was very little inter-speaker variation, and all speakers produced all Korean stops with long lag voice onset time.

The Mechanism and Representation of Korean Three-Way Phonation Contrast: External Photoglottography, Intra-Oral Air Pressure, Airflow, and Acoustic Data

This paper aims to refine our understanding of the speech mechanism and laryngeal features involved in the Korean lenis (/p t k/), aspirated (/ph th kh/), and fortis (/p' t' k'/) plosives. For this purpose we made measurements using a new noninvasive technique called external lighting and sensing photoglottography (ePGG) as well as intra-oral air pressure (Pio) above the glottis, airflow, and acoustic data. From simultaneous recordings of the experimental data, we were ableto quantify the laryngeal-oral coordination of glottal opening and a consonant release, and the covariance of airflow peak and duration of aspiration with glottal opening. The phasing of glottal opening and the 3-way phonation contrast occurs in the order, from early to late, fortis, lenis < aspirated plosives, and the glottal opening peak ranges from low to high in the same order. We also found that a Pio peak, the durations of a high Pio plateau and an oral closure, and F0 are independent of the glottal opening mechanism, varying in the order lenis < aspirated and fortis plosives. From these findings, we propose that the 2 independent patterns are accounted for by the articulator-based features [±spread glottis] and [±tense], respectively.

Supralaryngeal implementation of length and laryngeal contrasts in Japanese and Korean

AbstractThis article investigates supralaryngeal characteristics of Japanese and Korean length and laryngeal contrasts in stops and affricates. Electropalatography data collected from five Japanese and five Korean speakers revealed similar differences among the consonants in the degree of linguopalatal contact and duration of the closure. Japanese (voiceless) geminate and Korean fortis obstruents were most constricted and had the longest duration (although considerably longer in Japanese). Japanese voiced and Korean lenis obstruents were least constricted and had the shortest duration. Japanese voiceless (singleton) and Korean aspirated obstruents showed intermediate degree of contact and duration. Both stops and affricates showed a positive correlation between degree of contact and duration. The results show that the two very different sets of phonological contrasts are implemented similarly at the supralaryngeal level. These cross-language similarities and cross-category differences are proposed to result from the application of independently-motivated phonetic enhancement rules to distinct phonological representations of laryngeal/length contrasts in the two languages.

VOT merger and f0 contrast in Heritage Korean in California

Author(s): Cheng, Andrew | Abstract: Recordings of read speech in Korean and English were made by native South Koreans and Korean Americans of varying generational status (“second-generation” American-born or “1.5-generation” foreign-born) and analyzed for differences in usage of VOT and fundamental frequency to contrast production of Korean lenis and aspirated stops and affricates. The speech was then played back to listeners of Korean heritage and judged metalinguistically regarding proficiency in Korean and other attributes relevant to the speech and demographics of immigrant speakers. Results show that second-generation Korean speakers, especially females, are not showing the collapse of VOT contrast found in the other two groups, one part of the “tonogenetic” sound change nearing completion in Seoul. Female second-generation speakers are also not using f0 to differentiate between the stops to the extent that first- and 1.5- generation speakers are. These second-generation speakers were easily identifiable as having been born in the United States, but the correlation with their generational identification and use of VOT and f0 to contrast lenis and aspirated stops and affricates is mild. It is concluded that because second-generation Korean Americans vary in their production of Korean, there is no clear sociophonetic marker for a Korean American “variety” of the language. The most proficient second-generation speakers closely resemble native speakers and do demonstrate the tonogenetic sound change, but the least proficient second-generation speakers diverge from this norm in a variety of ways. Second-generation Korean American speakers are easily identifiable as not speaking in the same way as native South Korean speakers, although this does not hinge on their use of the f0 contrast. The analysis makes a stronger case for applying new models of language acquisition, speech production, and identity formation to heritage language speakers that differ from those used for bilingual speakers.

The perceptual assimilation of Korean obstruents by native Mandarin listeners

The current study reports the results of a perception experiment in which 20 naive native Mandarin listeners classified and rated the goodness of Korean stops /p, t, k, p(h), t(h), k(h), p*, t*, k*/, affricates /tɕ, tɕ*, tɕ(h)/, and fricatives /s(h), s*/ in terms of Mandarin segmental categories. It was found that listeners were sensitive to the voice onset time dimension of Korean stops and the presence of aspiration in Korean affricates, but Korean lenis and aspirated obstruents were generally assimilated to a single Mandarin category because the f0 cue differentiating them is not relevant to any Mandarin segmental contrast. The affricates were perceived as alveolopalatal and postalveolar more often than alveolar. The perception of fricatives was strongly influenced by vowel context, as the two fricatives were often perceived as different categories before /a/, but as the same category more often before /i/ and /u/. The results for the affricates and fricatives may be partly explained by Mandarin phonotactic constraints that prohibit alveolar and postalveolar consonants before /i/ and alveolopalatal consonants before /a/ or /u/.

The Production of Stops by Seoul and Yanbian Korean Speakers

This study investigates dialectal differences in the acoustic properties of Korean lenis, aspirated, and tense stops Seoul Korean (standard Korean) and Yanbian Korean (spoken in the largest Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China). This production study the main acoustic cues that each dialect uses to mark the laryngeal distinction between the three types of Korean stops. Measurements included VOT, and the initial F0 of the following vowel. Data collected from 10 young Seoul Korean speakers, 10 young Yanbian Korean speakers, and 6 older Yanbian speakers. two key findings: First, aspirated and lenis stops are mainly differentiated by F0 in Seoul Korean, and by H1*-H2* in Yanbian Korean. Second, there is no VOT merger between lenis and aspirated stops in Yanbian Korean, whereas there is in Seoul Korean. These results are discussed in terms of the phenomenon of VOT shift and the function of F0t is argued that the function of F0 to substitute for VOT difference as a primary cue for the coding of laryngeal contrast can be predicted by the pitch accent system of the language involved.

Stop production in bilingual and second language-learning children

This study examined stops produced by 7 year-old Korean-English bilingual (KEB) children and age-equivalent Korean children who had learned English as a second language (L2) in order to investigate how duration of exposure affects the PHONETIC systems of their two languages. A total of 60 children participated (15 per group; monolingual English, monolingual Korean, KEB and L2 children). Word-initial VOT and f0 values in the following vowel were measured in both languages. Comparison of English and Korean stops produced by monolingual children showed that the two English (voiced and voiceless) and three Korean (fortis, lenis, &amp; aspirated) stop types were fully distinguished. Like the monolinguals, KEB children produced English and Korean stops distinctively, indicating that they possess two separate stop systems. But while L2-learning children distinguished English voiced from Korean fortis, and English voiceless from Korean lenis, they produced English voiceless and Korean aspirated stops similarly. Compared to adult Korean L2 learners who did not distinguish English voiced from Korean fortis (Kang and Guion, 2006), the results here suggest that young L2 children express more sophisticated phonetic categories than do adult L2 learners. [Funded by NICHD (RHD061527A).]

Gestural overlap analysis of lenis stop reduction in Korean.

Korean lenis stops have been reported to become voiced intervocalically (Kagaya, 1974) and are often reduced to sonorants in casual speech with different degrees of reduction depending on the place of articulation (Lee, 1995). Velar lenis stops are more often reduced than the labials and coronals, which makes sense from the point of view of articulatory phonology (Browman and Goldstein, 1990). The oral gesture for a velar stop is on the same vocal tract tier (tongue body tier) as the neighboring vowels, so it should be more affected by overlap and blending with the vowel gestures than the closure gestures for other stops. This study investigates in what vowel environments lenis stop closure shows the most reduction. /VCV/ tokens in carrier sentences were recorded and acoustic analysis was done. The results showed that generally, reducing lenis stop closure is most in the environment of preceding and following low vowels, and least in the environment of high vowels, where the tongue body gestures of neighb...

An aerodynamic study of stops with different phonation types

Measurements were made of intraoral air pressure and oral airflow during the production of stops with different phonation types. The sounds investigated include Korean lenis and fortis, and Hindi voiced and murmured, stops. An aerodynamic model was used to simulate possible articulations which could produce air flows and pressures like those observed. For example, higher intraoral pressure and lower oral flow were found for Korean fortis as compared to lenis stops. This difference follows from a simulated difference in vocal tract wall tenseness. Furthermore, the right shape of intraoral pressure curves can be simulated with a difference in subglottal pressures. This analysis‐by‐synthesis approach, combining physiological measurements and articulatory modeling, provides new insights into differences in phonation types. [Work supported by USPHS grant NS 18163‐02 to Peter Ladefoged.]