Non-word repetition may reveal different errors in naive listeners and second language learners

Jeffrey J. Holliday,Minkyoung Hong 한국음성학회 2020 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.12 No.1

The perceptual assimilation of a nonnative phonological contrast can change with linguistic experience, resulting in naïve listeners and novice second language (L2) learners potentially assimilating the members of a nonnative contrast to different native (L1) categories. While it has been shown that this sort of change can affect the discrimination of the nonnative contrast, it has not been tested whether such a change could have consequences for the production of the contrast. In this study, L1 speakers of Mandarin Chinese who were (1) naïve to Korean, (2) novice L2 learners, or (3) advanced L2 learners participated in a Korean non-word repetition task using word-initial sibilants. The initial CVs of their repetitions were then played to L1 Korean listeners who categorized the initial consonant. The naïve talkers were more likely to repeat an initial /s<SUP>h</SUP>a/ as an affricate, whereas the L2 learners repeated it as a fricative, in line with how these listeners have been shown to assimilate Korean sibilants to Mandarin categories. This result suggests that errors in the production of new words presented auditorily to nonnative listeners may be driven by how they perceptually assimilate the nonnative sounds, emphasizing the need to better understand what drives changes in perceptual assimilation that accompany increased linguistic experience.

The acoustic realization of the Korean sibilant fricative contrast in Seoul and Daegu

Holliday Jeffrey J. 한국음성학회 2012 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.4 No.1

The neutralization of /sh/ and /s*/ in Gyeongsang dialects is a culturally salient stereotype that has received relatively little attention in the phonetic literature. The current study is a more extensive acoustic comparison of the sibilant fricative productions of Seoul and Gyeongsang dialect speakers. The data presented here suggest that, at least for young Seoul and Daegu speakers, there are few inter-dialectal differences in sibilant fricative production. These conclusions are supported by the output of mixed effects logistic regression models that used aspiration duration, spectral mean of the frication noise, and H1-H2 of the following vowel to predict fricative type in each dialect. The clearest dialect difference was that Daegu speakers' /sh/ and /s*/ productions had overall shorter aspiration durations than those of Seoul speakers, suggesting the opposite of the traditional "/s*/ produced as [sh]" stereotype of Gyeongsang dialects. Further work is needed to investigate whether /sh/-/s*/ neutralization in Daegu is perceptual rather than acoustic in nature.

The role of socio-indexical information in the perception of Gyeongsang fricatives

Holliday Jeffrey,Lee Hyunjung(이현정) 한국어학회 2021 한국어학 Vol.90 No.-

사람들은 흔히 경상 화자가 /ㅅ/-/ㅆ/을 변별해서 발음하지 못한다고 믿는다. 본 연구에서는 서울 화자와 대구 화자가 산출한 마찰음으로 자연 발화 자극과 기식 구간을 조절한 자극을 만들어 청자들에게 들려준 후, 이를 식별하고 발음을 평가하는 과제를 진행했다. 청자의 반은 화자가 모두 서울 화자라는 정보가, 나머지 반은 화자가 모두 경상 화자라는 정보가 주어졌다. 그 결과, 조작되지 않은 자연 자극 지각에서는 화자의 실제 방언이나 화자에 대해 받은 방언 정보가 아무 영향을 미치지 않았으나, 기식 구간을 조절한 자극에서는 차이가 있었다. 기식 구간이 /ㅅ/과 /ㅆ/ 사이에 있었을 경우, 화자가 경상 화자라는 정보를 받았을 때 자극을 /ㅆ/으로 들을 가능성이 더 높았다. 이러한 결과는 화자에 대한 정보가 마찰음 지각에 영향을 미칠 수 있다는 점과 음운 변이에 대한 기술은 음향학적 측정으로 최대한 보완해야 한다는 점을 시사한다. It is widely believed, correctly or not, that speakers of Gyeongsang Korean do not produce a clear contrast between the Korean sibilant fricatives /s/ and /s*/. In this study, listeners identified and rated natural and manipulated fricative productions of Seoul and Daegu talkers. Crucially, the listeners were told either that the talkers were from Seoul, or from Gyeongsang. It was found that while neither the talker’s actual dialect nor the primed dialect had any effect on listeners’ identification or rating of natural fricative productions, the listeners who were told the talkers were from Gyeongsang were more likely to perceive an ambiguous fricative as /s*/ than the listeners who were told the talkers were from Seoul. These results, while mixed, suggest that socio-indexical information about a talker may play a role in how their fricatives are perceived, and that descriptions of phonological variation should be supplemented by acoustic measurements whenever possible.

Interpreting Within- and Between-speaker Variability in L2 Korean Stop Productions

정환민,Jeffrey Holliday 한국어학회 2022 한국어학 Vol.94 No.-

Although it has been claimed that L2 speech is more variable than L1 speech, there is some evidence that L2 speech can be less variable than L1 speech. In this study we investigated whether L2 Korean speech is more variable than L1 Korean speech by looking at the VOT and f0 of stop productions from L2 Korean learners from four L1 backgrounds, considering both within- and between-speaker variability. It was found that L2 Korean stop productions are not necessarily more variable than native productions. For VOT, only L1 Vietnamese speakers’ lenis stops were more variable than those of L1 Korean speakers, and only in terms of within-speaker variability. For f0, it was found that the level of variability depended on the stop type, although significant L1-L2 differences were not found. We conclude by discussing how investigation into variability can help aid in the interpretation of measures of central tendency that are often used in research on L2 Korean phonological acquisition.

Executive function and Korean children’s stop production

공은정,이현정,Jeffrey J. Holliday 한국음성학회 2023 말소리와 음성과학 Vol.15 No.3

Previous studies have established a role for cognitive differences in explaining variability in speech processing across individuals. In the case of perceptual cue weighting in the context of a sound change, studies have produced conflicting results regarding the relationship between executive function and the use of redundant cues. The current study aimed to explore this relationship in acoustic cue weighting during speech production. Forty-one Korean-speaking children read a list of stop-initial words and completed two tests that assess executive function, i.e., Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) and digit n-back. Voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) were measured in each word, and analyses were carried out to determine the extent to which children’s executive function predicted their use of both informative and less informative cues to the three pairs comprising the Korean three-way stop laryngeal contrast. No evidence was found for a relationship between cognitive ability and acoustic cue weighting in production, which is at odds with previous, albeit conflicting, results for speech perception. While this result may be due to the lack of task demands in the production task used here, it nevertheless expands the empirical ground upon which future work in this area may proceed.

A phonetic investigation of some temporal properties of Paite obstruents

Chiin Ngaihmuan Ngaihte,Jeffrey J. Holliday,Kelly H. Berkson 한국음운론학회 2020 음성·음운·형태론 연구 Vol.26 No.2

Voice Onset Time has been successfully used to capture stop contrasts in a variety of languages, but much of the existing work has focused on 2-category languages, meaning those with 2-way laryngeal contrasts. Data for 3-category languages remain somewhat limited. Almost completely unrepresented in the existing literature is the Kuki-Chin sub-branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Kuki-Chin languages generally contain three stop types, contrasting voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops (e.g. /d/ vs. /t/ vs. /th/). This study presents an instrumental analysis of data from 12 speakers of Paite, an under-documented Kuki-Chin language from Northern India. We report the distribution of VOT across the three stop types and places of articulation, along with data that shed light on two unresolved issues in previous phonological descriptions: (1) both stop and fricative realizations have been reported for the sound generally referred to as the aspirated velar stop; (2) similarly, phonetically variable realizations have been reported for two affricate graphemes, <c> and <ch>. As previous reports of variability have been largely impressionistic, the data presented here help clarify the nature of the variation. In addition to representing the first-ever corpus of acoustic data in Paite, the current work is also, to the best of our knowledge, the first substantive study of VOT in a 3-category Kuki-Chin language.