A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF STOP PLACE PERCEPTION

Abstract

Perceptual salience may motivate phonological processes such as consonant place assimilation. This paper reports on an experiment designed to test the perceptual salience of consonant place of articulation by listeners who are native speakers of Korean and by listeners who are native speakers of American English. The results, when averaged across vowels and language, reveal dorsal and labial consonants to be highest on the salience ranking with coronals lowest. However, it was also found that phonetic salience of stop place depends on vowel environment. Speakers of Korean and American English also showed somewhat different patterns of confusions and overall sensitivity to place information in bursts and transitions. 1.