Perceptual Cues for the Word-Initial Nasal Stops in Korean

Abstract

This study investigated the role of the nasal murmur and vowel transitions as perceptual cues for Korean nasals. Three types of stimuli (murmur, vowel transition, and whole syllable) were generated from natural utterances of [n] with long vs. short murmur plus [u]/[a]. The results of the identification test showed that unlike the long murmur, the short murmur provides a weak perceptual cue for nasality. The short murmur could lead to the perception of nasals as voiced plosives. In contrast, more correct nasals responses were induced from the vowel [a] following the short murmur type rather than from the vowel [a] following the long murmur type. We suggest that there is the reciprocal relationship in perception between the relative salience of murmur and vowel transition. In this paper, we also showed that transition to vowel /a/ induced different perceptual results from transition to vowel /u/ did. In the future study, we will investigate a wide variety of nasals and the following vowel types to understand the full spectrum of the nasal-vowel sequence in Korean.