How many syllables do you hear? Korean perception of English coda plosives

Abstract This study investigates the direct perception of foreign structures in loanword phonology, concentrating on whether Korean listeners unnecessarily perceive an illusory vowel after a word-final plosive of English since a word-final voiceless plosive is permissible in their native language. In a syllable counting experiment, Korean participants listened to English nonce forms ending in a plosive and they indicated the number of syllables in each word. This study examined six different linguistic factors that may contribute to the perception of loanword borrowers including release, voicing and place of coda plosive, vowel tenseness, final stress and word size. The current results show that Korean listeners do perceive an extra syllable when the English pseudoword ends in a released plosive or in a syllable containing a tense vowel. This finding supports the hypothesis of adaptation in perception that unmotivated vowel insertion results from the misperception of English words rather than from a production grammar maintaining perceptual similarity between the English form and Korean pronunciation.