Perception and production mismatch in truncated past tense verbs in Korean

Abstract

Korean is often described as neutralizing its obstruents to unreleased stops in coda position. However, a stylistic truncated form of the intimate past tense expressing avuncularity, contradicts this description by realizing a fricative word finally. Despite tokens elicited from informants lacking phonetic evidence for a word-final vowel, speakers report hearing [ɨ] word-finally in these truncated forms. The present article gives an optimality theoretic (OT) account (McCarthy & Prince 1995) of this phenomenon by utilizing Benua’s (1995) base-truncated form (BT) constraints to explain the production of the form and Boersma & Hamann’s (2008) cue constraints to explain the mismatch between the production and perception in parallel to the treatment of loanwords. This suggests that output-output constraints and perceptual cue constraints may interact to create differences in phonological form between production and perception, even within native phonologies, and lends further support for the need for separate production and perception phonologies (Boersma 1999).