earticle

영어

Each language has acoustically and phonologically different stop consonant system. While English permits (phonemic) voice-voiceless distinction, Korean three types of voiceless stops differ in laryngeal activity. This experiment is to investigate how English speakers perceive non-native Korean consonant system, especially stops which have different feature categories from English. That is to identify if native speakers perceive non-native stop consonants according to phonological features or acoustic cue. Speech perception tasks-AX discrimination/ABX identification-are tested for this experiment. The information from the feature inventory proved not to be relevant in this study. On the contrary, the results lead us to conclude that acoustic properties concerning the VOT values rather than the native inventory feature is the crucial cue to perceive non-native stops. Different sensitivities of the VOT categories between English natives and Korean natives are empirically proved.