A contrastive study of Japanese and Korean consonants for Korean pronunciation practice

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26580075
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Akita International University
• Principal Investigator: Byun Hi-Gyung 国際教養大学, 国際教養学部, 助教 (90468124)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 韓国語閉鎖音 / 言語変化 / VOT / F0 / 対照研究 / 韓国語学習者

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The purpose of this study is to investigate the details of a recent sound change that occurred in Seoul Korean stops and to propose a new way to teach these Korean stops which have undergone this change to Japanese learners of Korean.
The result from 75 native speakers shows that those who were born after 1970 no longer use voice onset time (VOT) to distinguish lenis and aspirated stops but they use post-stop fundamental frequency (F0) instead as a primary cue for signaling the two stops. Japanese speaking learners are very sensitive to an F0 difference because they have lexical pitch accents in their native language. This study suggests the use of F0 information when distinguishing lenis stops from aspirated stops, that is, low F0 for lenis stops and high F0 for aspirated stops. The perception test has confirmed the efficacy of using F0 differences when teaching Korean stops.

Free Research Field

音声学