Phonetic cross study for phonetic cue from Korean and Chinese speakers with perception experiment about Korean dental fricatives

Abstract

This paper will analyze the phonetic cue of Korean and Chinese speakers and address what such cues mean in phonological terms. Korean dental fricatives have several important features from the perspective of phonetics and phonology. Also, for foreigners studying Korean, this has always been a difficult problem. This study begins with the assumption that the cause of these errors is the different phonetic cues in different languages. The purpose of this research is to identify the Korean dental fricative /ㅅ/(/s/) and /ㅆ/(/s’/) through a phonetic experiment. This experiment compares the perception results of Korean and Chinese speakers on sound stimuli manipulated based on the Chinese tone. The Korean speakers did not appear to perceive sounds with varying pitch levels, but the Chinese speakers perceived the sounds as having a modified sound level. These results show that the change in the pitch, not an important perception for Korean speakers, is an important cue for the perception of phonemes among Chinese speakers. It is shown that phonetic cue differs depending on the speech cue required to recognize phonemes in different languages. The study will be the first step in determining the cause of errors among Korean learners and foreigners in accordance with the special nature of the Korean dental fricative in future.