Immediate processing of context-independent variants: The case of /lk/ cluster in Korean
Tae-Hwan Choi, Jeong-Im Han · Phonetics and Speech Sciences · 2025
This study examined adult Korean speakers' immediate processing consequences of frequent, context-independent variants of sound changes in progress.The simplification pattern of the cluster /lk/ in Korean has been changing over the years to preserve [l] or even [lk] rather than the standard variant (i.e., [k]).After eight Korean disyllabic words containing three variants of /lk/ were presented with their complements, which were immediately followed by the target words alone, 90 native Korean listeners were asked to make lexical decisions regarding the target words.The results of a short-term repetition priming task demonstrated that word recognition processes were equally effective for the standard [k] and single innovative [l] without any significant difference in RT, which is compatible with the ongoing sound change in Korean.However, the recognition of words containing another innovative variant [lk] was significantly faster than that of words containing the other two variants.This result seems to be associated with the processing cost of the single variant form (both the standard and single innovative forms), because it is vulnerable to lexical competition with homophones or phonological neighbors.It was also shown that the participants who produced the [lk] variant more often were not necessarily good at recognizing the words containing this variant, suggesting a mismatch between speech perception and production.