Production and perception of Korean word-initial stops from a sound change perspective

Abstract

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.

Closure durations of Korean stops at three positions

“…Thus, they spent more processing time in their brains. Kim (2021) analyzed word-initial Korean stops and the following vowels, and found that VOT was almost the same in lenis and aspirated stops and was short in fortis stops, whereas f0 of the following vowels was shown in the order of lenis < fortis < aspirated stops. As discussed before, closure durations can also distinguish the laryngeal contrasts.…”

“…However, young generations nowadays distinguish lenis and aspirated stops using f0s of the following vowels (Kang, 2014;Silva, 2006). Kim (2021) used a spontaneous speech corpus to analyze VOTs of Korean wordinitial stops produced by Koreans in their 10s through 60s of age. He reported that the Korean speakers in their 10s through 30s produced the word-initial lenis and aspirated stops with almost the same VOTs but the word-initial fortis stops with lower VOTs.…”