The perception of Seoul Korean fricatives by listeners from five different native dialect and language groups

Previous studies have investigated the acoustic properties of Korean sibilant fricatives, with some attention given to effects of native dialect and language on both their production and perception. The current study investigates the effects of native dialect and language on the perception of Seoul Korean fricatives by testing the identification of fricative-initial CVs by native Korean speakers from Seoul, Daegu, and Jeju, as well as native Mandarin and Japanese second language learners of Korean. The results show that although native Korean listeners are far more accurate than non-native listeners, there was no significant variation within the native and non-native groups themselves. The results also show an inverse relationship between identification accuracy and vowel height that was consistent across both native and non-native listeners. This finding is in line with previous studies showing that the cues to the contrast are stronger in low vowel contexts than in high vowel contexts.