Perception of English Word-initial Onsets Resulting from Schwa Deletion by English and Korean Speakers

This paper explores whether native English and Korean speakers show perceptual sensitivity to the difference between well-formed and ill-formed onsets in English resulting from initial schwa deletion by conducting syllable judgment and identity judgment experiments. This is because schwa deletion creates not only well-formed onsets with a large sonority rise (e.g., police [plís]) but also ill-formed onsets with a small sonority rise (e.g., banana [bnǽnə]), a sonority flat (e.g., bazaar [bzá:r]), and a sonority fall (e.g., magician [mdʒíʃən]). The results of the experiments showed that English speakers were sensitive to the distinction between licit and illicit onsets regardless of task types or the number of syllables of the target words. In contrast, Korean speakers displayed sensitivity to English phonotactic restrictions on onsets only in the identity judgment task and their responses were also affected by the number of syllables of the target words. Moreover, no correlation was found between Korean speakers’ mean accuracy and their familiarity with the words. The overall findings are further discussed in terms of language-specific phonotactic constraints, task effects, and lexical representation.