Age-indexed perceptual cue-shifting of Korean stops in various prosodic positions

Using an auditory identification task, this study examined the perceptual cue-weightingpatterns of 29 younger Korean listeners as they distinguished between aspirated andlenis stops across various prosodic positions. The focus was on whether their perceptualroutines reflected the ongoing sound change, namely the cross-generational shift fromVOT to F0 in feature primacy. Consistent with the known prosodic constraint of thissound change, listeners relied more heavily on F0 cues in phrase-initial positions, whileVOT retained feature primacy in phrase-medial contexts. Importantly, listeners adjustedtheir cue-weighting strategies depending on the talker’s age. When listening to youngertalkers, as compared to older talkers, listeners were more responsive to F0 cues andreduced their reliance on VOT cues. These age-related effects occurred only forphrase-initial stops. Our findings suggest that Korean stop categorization is flexiblyinformed by both talker characteristics and speech prosody based on listeners’ priorexperiences, which would facilitate cross-talker adaptation, and that the age-indexedperceptual flexibility is categorically governed by the higher-order intonational structureof Seoul Korean. Overall, the results contribute to the understanding of how social andlinguistic factors interact in shaping mental representations of a sociophonetic variableunder sound change.