Perception of Korean alveolar fricatives by American learners

Abstract

This paper presents experimental data on how native English-speaking adult learners perceive Korean voiceless alveolar fricatives in a task soliciting sensitivity to prosodic context. College students in a second semester Korean class were asked to identify tokens of the two contrasting Korean fricatives, lax /s/ and tense /ss/, using letters of the Korean alphabet while rating their confidence on a scale from 1 (not confident at all) to 7 (very confident). Four native speakers of Korean (M = 2; F = 2) produced 24 tokens of the target sounds in construction with /a/ in three different prosodic contexts, viz., prevocalic word-initial, pre-emphatic intervocalic, and post-emphatic intervocalic positions. The results show a tendency for subjects to classify both Korean fricatives as lax /s/ under most conditions, except that tense /ss/ was often separately identified when preceded by an emphasized vowel. Phonetically, Korean /ss/ is of greater duration and intensity in a post-emphatic context than elsewhere, hence more distinct from /s/ in both Korean and English and so, apparently, more easily identifiable for beginning learners.