Changing cues? How L2 Korean learners navigate VOT and F0 in Korean stop categorization

English distinguishes stop consonants through a binary voicing contrast, with voiced stops having shorter Voice Onset Time (VOT) than their voiceless counterparts. In contrast, Korean distinguishes stops into three categories: lenis, aspirated, and fortis. In both languages, VOT and the fundamental frequency (F0) of the following vowel are critical cues to distinguish stop contrasts. Korean listeners primarily rely on F0 for Korean stops (particularly when distinguishing lenis from aspirated) whereas English listeners primarily rely on VOT for English stops (Schertz et al., 2015). This presents a challenge for English learners of Korean, who must adapt to using different phonetic cues for categorizing ambiguous stops. This study investigates which phonetic cues are most informative to distinguish Korean stops by measuring adult L1 Korean speakers’ and L2 Korean learners’ speech categorization patterns using a Visual Analog Scaling Task, an updated approach to understanding speech categorization (Apfelbaum et al., 2022). Participants’ exposure to Korean and English is measured through a Social Network Questionnaire (SNQ). Similar to prior findings (Kutlu et al., 2024), L2 listeners who have more exposure to Korean, as measured by their SNQ, are expected to show more gradient categorization in Korean.