Pistas acústicas y perceptivas en la distinción de oclusivas en inicio absoluto e intervocálicas en coreano

Abstract

The Korean language shows a phonological distinction between three types of stops. The overall purpose of this research is to study the acoustic parameters that allow native speakers of the Seoul standard dialect to differentiate between the three stop series, which are the following: series 1 stops: voiceless, lax, slightly aspirated; as follows show voiced allophones between voiced segments, typically vowels; series 2 stops: voiceless, tense, non-aspirated; series 3 stops: voiceless, tense, heavily aspirated. These features draw a distinction between nine consonant phonemes. The starting point of this analysis is a corpus of data obtained from native speakers of Korean, who subsequently went through three different perception tests (described in section 2.2). These tests were meant to study which clues allow the discrimination of the three stops series: a) the tension feature (as claimed in Kim 1965) or 2) VOT (as suggested in Lisker and Abramson 1964). The data obtained from the perception tests suggest a) that the voicing lag is not an absolute clue, as speakers do not differentiate between lax and tense series on this basis, although they do distinguish between the tense, heavily aspiraded series 3 and the tense, non-aspirated series 2; and b) that the tension feature, shown off in different acoustic parameters (previous-vowel duration, following-vowel intensity, intervocalic silence duration), is a crucial clue in the discrimination of the different types of Korean stops.