This study investigates how French learners, whose native language has only a binary laryngeal contrast, acquire the Korean three-way laryngeal contrast in stops by focusing on cue weighting. We tested how 21 French learners of Korean identify fortis/lenis/aspirated Korean stops over eight monthly sessions. Learners were the most successful at identifying aspirated stops. The identification of lenis stops was the most challenging, with no improvement over the 8 months, whereas the perception of aspirated and fortis stops improved. In order to explain the difficulty with lenis stops, we tested the relative contribution of VOT and f0 to the perception of the contrast on synthesized stimuli. Learners showed different cue-weighting strategies: VOT was used to distinguish between aspirated and fortis/lenis, and f0 was used to differentiate between fortis and lenis, implying a two-way rather than a three-way contrast. Furthermore, the larger weight given to VOT compared to f0 by the French learners can explain the poor identification of lenis stops, whose main contrastive cue in Korean is a lowering of f0 on the following vowel. Based on these findings, the acquisition of the three-way contrast necessitates a reorganization of the cues' relative weight.
Cite as: Lee, B., Yamaguchi, N., Fougeron, C. (2022) Why is Korean lenis stop difficult to perceive for L2 Korean learners? Proc. Interspeech 2022, 1861-1865, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10912
@inproceedings{lee22n_interspeech,
author={Boram Lee and Naomi Yamaguchi and Cécile Fougeron},
title={{Why is Korean lenis stop difficult to perceive for L2 Korean learners?}},
year=2022,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2022},
pages={1861--1865},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10912}
}