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KMID : 0917520030100010041
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Journal of Speech Sciences
2003 Volume.10 No. 1 p.41 ~ p.58
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Phonetic Functionalism in Coronal/Non-coronal Asymmetry
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Kim Sung-A
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Abstract
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Coronal/non-coronal asymmetry refers to the typological trend wherein coronals rather than non-coronals are more likely targets in place assimilation. Although the phenomenon has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of unmarkedness in formalistic approaches to sound patterns, the examination of rules and representations cannot answer why there should be such a process in the first place. Furthermore, the motiva-tion of coronal/non-coronal asymmetry has remained controversial to date even in the field of phonetics.
The present study investigated the listeners´ perception of coronal and non-coronal stops in the context of VC_1C_2V after critically reviewing the three types of phonetic accounts for coronal/non-coronal asymmetry, i.e., articulatory, perceptual, and gestural overlap accounts. An experiment was conducted to test whether the phenomenon in question may occur, given the listeners´ lack of perceptual ability to identify weaker place cues in VC transitions as argued by Ohala (1990), i.e., coronals have weak place cues that cause listeners´ misperception. Spliced nonsense VC_1C_2V utterances were given to 20 native speakers of English and Korean. Data analysis showed that majority of the subjects reported C_2 as C_1. More importantly, the place of articulation of C1 did not affect the listeners´ identification. Compared to non-coronals, coronals did not show a significantly lower rate of correct identifications. This study challenges the view that coronal/non-coronal asymmetry is attributable to the weak place cues of coronals, providing evidence that CV cues are more perceptually salient than VC cues. While perceptual saliency account may explain the frequent occurrence of regressive assimilation across languages, it cannot be extended to coronal/non-coronal asymmetry.
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