Boundary and pitch effects on the perception of Korean alveolar nasal

Abstract

Kang, Hyunsook. (2016). Boundary and pitch effects on the perception of Korean alveolar nasal. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 24(4), 23-38. This study investigates alveolar nasal perception on various portions of two Korean [ni] sequences: one [ni] sequence in the suffix medial position of -mnita with L tone and the other [ni] sequence at the IP-final position -ni with H tone. The perception test results show that various portions of [ni] from the suffix-medial position induce significantly more errors than the corresponding portions of [ni] from the IP-final position in all three conditions (vowel, murmur-vowel, and the whole phrase). The test results also show that suffix-medial [ni] sequences of some speakers obtain near-perfect perception scores as [mi], showing that [n] has undergone the categorical change to [m]. This shows that unlike the traditional assumption, Korean may allow progressive place assimilation if the target is the least prominent segment in the environment, like an alveolar nasal [n] in the context of /nasal__i/.