Affricate-fricative perception in Korean listeners: Evidence for universal and language specific biases

Abstract

Although language experience has a profound impact on phonetic perception, there is increasing evidence that phonetic perception is also shaped by universal biases which can be revealed as asymmetries in discrimination performance. In the present study, we explore potential perceptual asymmetries in adult Korean perception of four English affricate-fricative contrasts. Korean adults completed a native-language assimilation task and a category-based AX discrimination task with the phonemic contrast /tʃa-sa/ and non-phonemic contrasts /tʃa-ʃa/, /dʒa-za/ and /dʒa-ʒa/. Both voiceless contrasts—/tʃa-sa/ and /tʃa-ʃa/—were assimilated to distinct Korean affricate and fricative categories and were discriminated very well (>90%); performance revealed no perceptual asymmetries. Both voiced contrasts—/dʒa-za/ and /dʒa-ʒa/—were assimilated to the same Korean affricate category (/tʃa/) and were poorly discriminated (63-65%); performance was asymmetric on different pairs for both contrasts (fricative-affricate pairs>affricate-fricative pairs) and on same pairs for /dʒa-ʒa/ (fricative-fricative pairs>affricate-affricate pairs). These findings, and prior research, show that asymmetrical performance on different pairs is highly uniform and predicted by phone type, pointing to a possible universal bias favoring sharp amplitude onsets. However, asymmetries in same pair performance are predicted by language categorization and thus appear to be shaped by language-specific experience.

Neural Mechanisms Underlying Cross-Modal Phonetic Encoding

“…Previous imaging work has identified several brain regions that could act as hubs for fusion of AV percepts, including but not limited to the following: the posterior STS/G (Calvert et al, 2000;Beauchamp et al, 2004Beauchamp et al, , 2010Erickson et al, 2014), middle STS (Miller and D'Esposito, 2005;Venezia et al, 2017), middle temporal gyrus (Beauchamp et al, 2004), and superior parietal lobule (Molholm, 2006). However, the findings of these studies do not categorically link these networks with fusion of AV percepts per se.…”

“…Prior AV and visual-only studies demonstrated that vision activates low-and high-level regions of the auditory cortex (Calvert et al, 1997;but Bernstein et al, 2002;Ghazanfar et al, 2005;Kayser et al, 2008Kayser et al, , 2010Okada et al, 2013). Ghazanfar et al (2005) showed that species-specific face and voice integration takes place in the core and lateral belt of the auditory cortex, the same regions that give rise to the N1 AEP in humans (Scherg et al, 1989;Zouridakis et al, 1998).…”