Native Koreans’ perception of voicing in VC position: Prosodic restructuring effects on consonant identification

Many cross-language perceptual models consider allophonic distributions in predicting the pattern of cross-language perception. Allophonic processes, however, are related to not only the existence of particular phonetic events but also to their linkage to the particular context in which such phonetic events occur. This study investigated how the determination of context and allophonic variation interact in the perception of second language speech. Korean has a restriction against laryngeal contrasts in final position while such a restriction does not exist in English. When Korean learners of English acquire the contrast in final position, it is possible that they reparse the prosodic structure, placing the contrast in a different prosodic location such as in the prevocalic position of a perceptually epenthesized following syllable. To determine whether such prosodic reanalysis strategies might exist, 20 college-age inexperienced Korean learners of English were presented with American English labial and coronal obstruents in CV and VC nonsense words and were asked to perform two tasks: 1) consonant identification and 2) syllable counting. As reported in previous research (Lim, 2003), the results show that listeners often parsed the VC stimuli as two syllables. For the voiceless consonants, this reparsing afforded better accuracy in consonant identification, as expected. However, for voiced consonants, such a voicing benefit due to prosodic restructuring was not observed. This discrepancy between voiceless and voiced segments appears to be due to the fact that the intervocalic contrast in Korean fosters a bias toward voiceless category by placing the English final voiced consonants in the voiceless category. These results demonstrate that L2 learners may use prosodic restructuring, but such a strategy is not necessarily useful in the perception of second language speech.