Kyungsang Korean Subjects' Perception of Japanese Pitch-accent

The purpose of the present study is to examine whether native speakers of Kyungsang Korean are sensitive to pitch variation in vowels after Japanese voiced and voiceless plosives, given the tonogenesis account that the tone difference -H and L in vowels after aspirated and fortis consonants and after lenis ones, respectivelyis lexically specified word-initially in Korean [6]. In order to investigate this, we selected Kyungsang Korean which has a lexical pitch-accent like Japanese, and conducted a perception experiment where eighty native speakers of Kyungsang Korean in their early 20s (40 male and 40 female) participated. The results showed that our subjects are not sensitive at all to pitch variation in vowels after Japanese voiced and voiceless plosives in wordinitial position and also after word-medial Japanese consonants. This indicates that the lexical specification of the H/L distinctions in word-initial position in the tonogenesis account of Korean consonants is not empirically supported by the present perception experiment. It is then suggested that Kyungsang Korean subjects‟ perception of Japanese voiced and voiceless plosives is driven by the laryngeal features [tense, spread glottis], regardless of pitch variation, like Seoul Korean subjects‟ [4].