Jiwon Hwang

Phonetic status of Cj combinations in Korean and Spanish.

Korean allows combinations of consonant and glide (CG) at onset position but forbids obstruent+liquid (OL) clusters. This is a potential problem for the universal sonority dispersion principle, which can be avoided if the Korean CG combinations are secondary‐articulated consonants rather than clusters. To see if this hypothesis is phonetically supported, we compared Korean with Spanish, which allows both CG and OL onsets. F2 at the vocoid onset of (C)jV syllables varied as a function of the backness of the following vowel in Korean, whereas it stayed constant in Spanish. The vocoid duration increase from CV to (C)jV was also smaller in Korean. This shows that the Korean /j/ is weak in that it lacks a target frequency and its tongue position is decided by the following vowel. However, this property is not confined to the Cj combination, as CjV and jV syllables behaved in the same way. Our results thus support the idea that the Korean CG is close to secondary‐articulated consonants, but the weak realization...

Cross‐linguistic interpretation of duration.

In Korean, intervocalic [l] is realized as tap ([tal]/[tar‐i] ‘moon/moon+nom’). In English loanwords, however, intervocalic /l/ is generally adapted as a geminate lateral ([sollo] ‘solo’ but [sara] ‘Sarah’). We present evidence from event‐related potentials supporting an analysis in which Korean listeners perceive intervocalic single [l] (illegal in Korean) as geminate [ll], reinterpreting the English [r‐l] contrast in terms of the Korean [r‐ll] contrast ([dari] ‘bridge’, [dalli] ‘differently’). Korean and English participants heard two sets of oddball paradigms, [ele‐elle] and [ene‐enne]. In both cases, the acoustic difference is the same, 48 versus 98 msec. However, the nasal pair represents a cross‐category contrast in Korean ([kanan] ‘poverty’, [kannan] ‘newborn’) while the lateral pair represents a noncontrastive difference. Consistent with studies showing a stronger mismatch negativity (MMN) to cross‐category changes than to within‐category changes, Korean listeners displayed a significantly larger ...

Is there a bilingual advantage in phonetic and phonological acquisition? : The initial learning of word-final coronal stop realization in a novel accent of English

Research question: We address the question of whether the cognitive advantage of the bilingual mind, already demonstrated in the case of auditory processing or novel word acquisition, also applies to other linguistic domains, specifically to phonetic and phonological learning. Design: We compare the performance of 17 monolinguals and 25 bilinguals from Canada in a production experiment with two tasks: imitation and spontaneous reproduction of a novel foreign accent, specifically Sussex English. Data and analysis: To eliminate potential sources of variability, our focus is on a sound already existing in the subjects’ production (the glottal stop), but differently mapped to surface representations in the novel accent to which they were exposed (i.e., as an allophone of coronal stops in word-final position). We measured the glottal stop rates of our subjects in baseline, training, and post-training. Results: The two groups behaved differently, with bilinguals showing a larger increase of their glottal stop rate post-training. Our results are thus consistent with a bilingual advantage in phonetic and phonological learning. Originality: We interpret these findings in light of recent psycholinguistic work and conclude that echoic memory strategies, possibly underlain by stronger subcortical encoding of sound in bilinguals, may account for our results by facilitating the re-mapping between existing mental representations of sounds and existing articulatory command configurations. Significance: Our study adds to the body of work suggesting that there may be an advantage of bilingualism in second dialect learning in adulthood, and provides an explanation in terms of perceptual strategies in which echoic memory is involved. We also contribute to the body of research suggesting that imitation of an action can result in improved understanding of that action.

The effect of allophonic variation and phonotactic restriction on categorization

This study presents a case from Korean which demonstrates that allophonic and phonotactic knowledge has an effect on listeners’ categorization choices. In Korean, voicing is generally treated as redundant on consonants since the only voiced consonants are nasals and liquids. However, voiced oral stops can occur intervocalically as allophones of the voiceless lenis counterpart. A further restriction comes from the velar nasal [ŋ], which is restricted to coda position. Two identification experiments, in which Korean listeners were presented with a 10-step continuum from voiced oral to nasal stop in three places of articulation and were asked to decide whether they heard a nasal or not, showed an earlier boundary shift in the nasal responses in the initial position than in the medial position. This finding suggests that Korean listeners do perceive the redundant/allophonic [voice] feature and are likely to interpret a stop containing this feature as nasal in initial position but as an allophonic oral variant...

English focus prosody processing and production by Mandarin speakers

Our study compared the processing and production of English focus prosody by native speakers of English and Mandarin. Twenty-one Mandarin speakers living in the US and 21 English speakers participated in two tasks. In the processing task, participants responded to instructions that contained natural or unnatural contrastive prosody (Click on the purple sweater; Now click on the SCARLET sweater/Now click on the PURPLE jacket.) In the production task, participants guided an experimenter to place colored objects on a white board, with some contexts designed to elicit contrastive focus (Put the yellow arrow over the ORANGE arrow/yellow DIAMOND, please). All adjectives and nouns were bisyllabic trochees. The two groups differed in their realization of focus, with English speakers tending to align the pitch peak with the stressed syllable and Mandarin speakers with the right edge of the focused word. However, comparison of reaction times for the processing task indicated that both groups responded more quickly ...

The Korean Prevocalic Palatal Glide: A Comparison with the Russian Glide and Palatalization.

Phonetic studies of the Korean prevocalic glides have often suggested that they are shorter in duration than those of languages like English, and lack a prolonged steady state. In addition, the formant frequencies of the Korean labiovelar glide are reported to be greatly influenced by the following vowel. In this study the Korean prevocalic palatal glide is investigated vis-à-vis the two phonologically similar configurations of another language - the glide /j/ and the secondary palatalization of Russian, with regard to the inherent duration of the glide component, F2 trajectory, vowel-to-glide coarticulation and glide-to-vowel coarticulation. It is revealed that the Korean palatal glide is closer to the Russian palatalization in duration and F2 trajectory, indicating a lack of steady state, and to the Russian segmental glide in the vowel-to-glide coarticulation degree. When the glide-to-vowel coarticulation is considered, the Korean palatal glide is distinguished from both Russian categories. The results suggest that both the Korean palatal glide and the Russian palatalization involve significant articulatory overlap, the former with the vowel and the latter with the consonant. Phonological implications of such a difference in coarticulation pattern are discussed, as well as the comparison between the Korean labiovelar and palatal glides.

International teaching assistants’ production of focus intonation

We report on a longitudinal investigation of the realization of English focus by 19 Mandarin-speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Participants read passages containing contrastive information (e.g., The price of a train ticket is twenty dollars, while the price of a bus ticket is eleven dollars), and then responded to the experimenter’s questions (Is the price of a bus ticket twenty dollars?). ITAs were tested within a month of their arrival in the US, and again at the end of their first semester. Overall, the productions of ITAs at both points in time were judged as less natural by native English listeners than the productions of the native speakers of English, though the naturalness of some ITA productions improved at the second sampling. Acoustic analyses of the ITA productions and comparison with the productions of 18 native English speakers revealed a good deal of interspeaker variability in the ITA productions, with several different patterns associated with the “unnatural” productions...

International teaching assistants’ production of English focus marking

This study investigates the realization of English focus by 18 Mandarin-speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs). Participants read passages containing contrastive information (e.g., The price of a train ticket is twenty dollars, while the price of a bus ticket is eleven dollars), and then responded to the experimenter’s questions (Is the price of a bus ticket twenty dollars?). ITAs were tested within a month of their arrival in the US, and again at the end of their first semester. Overall, the productions of ITAs at both points in time were judged as less natural by native English listeners than the productions of the native speakers of English, though the naturalness of some ITA productions improved at the second sampling. Acoustic analyses of the ITA productions and comparison with the productions of 18 native English speakers revealed a good deal of interspeaker variability in the ITA productions, with several different patterns associated with the ‘unnatural’ productions: (a) failure to acce...

Cue weighting and variability in perception and production.

The Korean single liquid phoneme shows an allophonic variation: lateral [l] occurs in coda and tap [r] in onset. Intervocalically, they may appear contrastive as tap or geminate lateral [ll] ([iri] wolf vs [illi] reason), differing in duration and laterality. Kim [(2007)] demonstrated that Korean listeners identified a shortened geminate lateral as geminate /ll/ rather than tap, despite the fact that the duration of edited stimuli was matched for tap. The current study examines whether the weighting of laterality cues over duration cues for [ll] vs [r] is motivated by the native language acoustics. Korean speakers produced 24 Korean words [(C)V_V], containing [ll] or [r] in two speech modes (in a carrier sentence vs in isolation). The duration of [ll] was significantly longer than tap, but it varied greatly depending on the speech mode while tap did not. The intensity of tap was significantly lower than [ll] generally, but it showed a greater variability. However, F3 at the offset of the preceding vowel w...

Factors inducing cross‐linguistic perception of illusory vowels.

Japanese speakers tended to hear an illusory vowel in illegal consonant sequences (Dupoux et al., 1999). Korean has no sequences of stop followed by nasal; therefore, it is expected that Korean speakers would perceive an illusory vowel in stop‐nasal. In an identification task comparing Korean and English listeners on stimuli along a continuum that ranged from no vowel (igna/ikna) to a full vowel (igVna/ikVna), Korean listeners reported the presence of a vowel significantly more often than English listeners, even when there is no vowel in the stimuli. However, this effect was found only when the stop was voiced, even though [kn] and [gn] are both illegal Korean sequences. In an AXB discrimination task, Korean participants had more difficulty discriminating ‘stop‐nasal’ from ‘stop‐V‐nasal’ than English participants, again only when the stop was voiced. The results suggest that voicing, rather than simple illegality, induces bias toward perception of illusory vowel in Korean. This is explained by the fact th...