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Abstract:
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The focus of this study was to explore how prosodic position and word type affect the phonetic structure and resulting perceptual identification of Korean stops and fricatives . When there is less contextual information , speakers tend to produce clearer speech . For example , consonants at the beginning of prosodic domains , such as syllables , words or phrases , are known to be more clearly articulated and distinguishable than later -occurring consonants . However , it is not yet clear whether the prosodically conditioned realizations of a segment are perceptually distinctive in continuous speech . In addition , there are few studies examining whether the properties of prosodic domain -initial segments are affected by the information content of words (real vs . nonsense words ) . The acoustic properties of stops and fricatives were compared across IP , PP and Wd -initial positions both in real and nonsense words . It was found that segments in the higher prosodic domain -initial positions showed enhanced durational properties compared to the lower prosodic domain -initial positions . However , the enhancing strategies were different among phonation types . Relative to lenis and aspirated stops , and lenis fricatives , tense stops and fricatives showed less consistent variation as a function of prosodic position and word type . In the perception study , the identification error rates and reaction time for same -spliced CVs were compared to those for cross -spliced CVs . Korean listeners identified the same -spliced CVs more accurately and faster than cross -spliced CVs . In addition , the distinctive acoustic properties of each prosodic domain -initial position were perceptually distinguished by Korean listeners . Due to relatively shorter duration and less distinctive contrast , the target CVs extracted from lower prosodic domain -initial positions caused more confusion in the identification of target segments . In conclusion , this study provides the evidence that speakers modulate their speech clarity depending on information content . By enhancing phonetic properties and phonological contrast , speakers tend to provide perceptual cues for prosodic positions with less contextual information . |