본 연구는 이음과 다른 음운적 혹은 음성적 범주의 심리적 실체를 규명함으로써 전통적인 음운론 접근방법인 SPE와 최근에 많은 사람들의 관심을 끌고 있는 Exemplar theory를 겅험적으로 비교, 검증하는데 목적이 있다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 목적을 위해 한국어 양순음 ...

본 연구는 이음과 다른 음운적 혹은 음성적 범주의 심리적 실체를 규명함으로써 전통적인 음운론 접근방법인 SPE와 최근에 많은 사람들의 관심을 끌고 있는 Exemplar theory를 겅험적으로 비교, 검증하는데 목적이 있다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 목적을 위해 한국어 양순음을 바탕으로 AXB 구별실험과 simialrity ranking 실험을 60명의 한국어 화자들을 대상으로 실시하였다. 결과를 보면, 두 실험에서 모두 음소는 잘 구별되어 인지되고 있고, 이음의 경우는 음소보다 덜 구별되어 인지되지만 음성적 차이를 어느 정도 구별하고 있으며, 이음의 경우는 해당 토큰이 실제단어인지 아니면 비단어인지 그리고 진도수가 높은 단어인지 아닌지에 따라 큰 차이를 보이고 있다는 것을 나타내었다. 이러한 결과는 전통적인 음운론의 접근방법보다는 Exemplar Theory의 틀 안에서 더 잘 설명되고 있음을 알 수 있었다.

The present study examines the perceptual status of allophones to test two distinct models to explain the phonological and phonetic categories such as SPE vs. Exemplar Theory. With the use of Korean bilabial stops, phonemic, allophonic and two types o ...

The present study examines the perceptual status of allophones to test two distinct models to explain the phonological and phonetic categories such as SPE vs. Exemplar Theory. With the use of Korean bilabial stops, phonemic, allophonic and two types of low-level phonetic pairs were generated, and their perception by Korean listeners was examined. Through AXB discrimination and similarity ranking tasks, it was shown that phonemes are fully discriminated, while other categories are less. However, there were significant differences in similarity ratings between the tokens for an allophone pair and two identical tokens, suggesting that allophones are also discriminated by natives. Furthermore, perceptual discrimination of phonological and phonetic categories was shown to be influenced by lexicality and partly by episodic information such as token frequency. Overall these results are better explained in Exemplar Theory than the traditional symbolic approach.

The present study examines the perceptual status of allophones to test two distinct models to explain the phonological and phonetic categories such as SPE vs. Exemplar Theory. With the use of Korean bilabial stops, phonemic, allophonic and two types o ...

The present study examines the perceptual status of allophones to test two distinct models to explain the phonological and phonetic categories such as SPE vs. Exemplar Theory. With the use of Korean bilabial stops, phonemic, allophonic and two types of low-level phonetic pairs were generated, and their perception by Korean listeners was examined. Through AXB discrimination and similarity ranking tasks, it was shown that phonemes are fully discriminated, while other categories are less. However, there were significant differences in similarity ratings between the tokens for an allophone pair and two identical tokens, suggesting that allophones are also discriminated by natives. Furthermore, perceptual discrimination of phonological and phonetic categories was shown to be influenced by lexicality and partly by episodic information such as token frequency. Overall these results are better explained in Exemplar Theory than the traditional symbolic approach.

In ABX discrimination and similarity ranking, the perceptual status of phonological and phonetic categories was assessed. The results are summarized as follows: first, phoneme pairs were fully discriminated in ABX discrimination and similarity ranking ...

In ABX discrimination and similarity ranking, the perceptual status of phonological and phonetic categories was assessed. The results are summarized as follows: first, phoneme pairs were fully discriminated in ABX discrimination and similarity ranking tasks, while allophonic pairs and phonetic variant pairs were less saliently discriminated than phonemic pairs. However, more importantly, Korean listeners distinguished the phonetic differences of allophones, even though they discriminated such allophonic pairs below the chance level. There were significant differences in the scores between allophone pairs and control pairs in the similarity ranking task. Similarly, the phonetic variant pair with 130 ms of VOT was rated as more different than that with 100 ms of VOT. These differences were not likely to be due to the raw phonetic differences between the stimuli as proposed in previous studies such as Jaeger (1980, 1986), Pegg & Werker (1997) and Whalen et al. (1997) where two allophones were argued to be distinguished only at a much lower level. The similarity ranking task is usually used to capture the phonological processing, not surface phonetic processing (Boomershine et al. in press), and thus those significant differences between the allophonic pair and the identical pair on the one hand, and between the phonetic variant with a relatively large amount of acoustic cues and that with a small amount of acoustic cues on the other suggest that they are not simply a result of the raw overall auditory qualities of the sounds, but are strongly tied to the phonological system of the native language of the listeners. However, it is interesting to note that the results for discrimination and similarity ranking were not consistent. In similarity ranking, Korean listeners’ perception of the two types of phonetic variant pairs was sensitive to the amount of aspiration: the pair with 130 ms of VOT was rated as more different than that with 100 ms of VOT. However, in discrimination, there were no significant differences between the pair with 130 ms of VOT and that with 100 ms of VOT.
Second, the results of the present study showed that overall real word pairs showed higher mean correct scores in discrimination than non-word pairs. Phonemic pair types, whose categories were already robustly established, were not overridden by lexicality effect, but in allophonic and phonetic variant pair types, lexicality played a crucial role in discrimination: real words were more successfully discriminated than non-words.
Finally, discrimination seemed to be only partly affected by the episodic information such as frequency and recency. It was expected in Exemplar Theory that more recently given words and high frequency words were easier in discrimination, while in SPE, such episodic information was expected to be trivial in discrimination. However, it was shown that there was no better performance in the case where the target token was presented more recently; only in allophone pair type words the high frequency word was easier in discrimination than the low frequency word. Thus the expectation from Exemplar Theory was not borne out in the case of episodic information of recency, and information from frequency only influenced the discrimination of allophonic pairs.
Based on these results, it was shown that both models are successful in predicting one of another part of our findings relating to the phonological and phonetic categories such as phonemes, allophones, and phonetic variants. However, Exemplar Theory seems to be better in accounting for a wider range of results obtained in the present study.