Japanese and Korean speakers' perceptual boundary and discrimination sensitivity of Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ʦ/

Abstract

To clarify Japanese and Korean speakers' perception characteristics of the Japanese fricative /s/ and affricate /ʦ/, a perception experiment was conducted in which 40 Japanese and 40 Korean speakers made a two-alternative forced choice for the /s/–/ʦ/ stimulus continuum developed by modifying the rise and steady+decay durations of frication. The Korean speakers' perceptual boundary of /s/ and /ʦ/ was similar to, but slightly different from, that of Japanese speakers, and their discrimination sensitivity was lower than that of Japanese speakers. However, Korean speakers' perception of these consonants was fairly good, even though /ʦ/ is not a phoneme of the Korean language. The results suggest that Korean speakers can apply the acoustic features of Korean fricatives and affricates to perceive the Japanese /s/ as well as /ʦ/ that does not exist in their first language.