Ahn, Miyeon. 2019. Language-dependent perception of lateral /l/. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 25.2. 177-193. 

The presence of allophonic variation is known to be a strong cue to signal various linguistic constituents, and native listeners find the information useful during their perceptual process (Beddor and Krakow 1999, McQueen 2005, Newman et al. 2011). The same kind of information may be interpreted differently by nonnative listeners. The purpose of this study is to examine Korean-speaking listeners’ perception of English lateral-involved sequences (e.g., feel#ease vs. fee#lease). In this study, we cross-spliced clear and dark allophones and asked the listeners to identify word boundaries. In the perception task, the listeners performed more accurately when the degree of the darkness coincided with cues from word junctures, but they perceived much more l# (i.e., coda percept) when the acoustic details were not consistent with cues from word junctures. Based on a two-stage processing model (Kingston 2005, Coetzee 2010), we suggest that phonetically deviated representations (e.g., lC# and #lD) are phonologically repaired, which results in the listeners being biased toward a coda-percept which is well-formed in their native knowledge. (Hankyong National University, Assistant Professor)

Keywords: nonnative speech perception, lateral, allophonic variations, Koreanspeaking listeners