Kong, Eun Jong and Kang, Soyoung. 2017. Individual variability in processing English source input into Korean stops. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 23.2. 201-219.

The current study investigates whether and how Korean listeners are influenced by English source input in identifying three laryngeal categories of Korean stops (/t’/, /t/, and /th /). We relate identification patterns of Korean and English source input to individuals’ utilizations of two acoustic cues (VOT and f0) under the English source condition. Korean adult listeners (N=53) participated in three-way forced-choice identification tasks where the auditory stimuli of VOT×f0 combinations synthesized from Korean and English speakers’ productions were presented in two separate sessions. Both group-averaged and individual-level analyses showed varying degrees of source effects on listeners’ identifications of the Korean stops, revealing that the response category distributions are meaningfully related to individual listeners’ modifications of cue-weighting strategies confronted by the English-source signals. Our results suggest that non-native source input modifies individual strategies in dealing with sub-phonemic acoustic cues, ultimately yielding different category identification patterns from native input identifications. (Korea Aerospace University and Carleton University)