Discrimination of Korean Lenis and Aspirated Stops in Intermediate and Advanced Chinese Learners of Korean

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether perceptual assimilation patterns of non-native sounds to native sound categories predict discriminability of non-native contrasts in terms of the Perceptual Assimilation Model. Intermediate and advanced Chinese learners of Korean were tested with the Korean lenis-aspirated stop contrasts /pa/-/pha/, /ta/-/tha/, and /ka/-/kha/ in assimilation and discrimination tasks. Results of the assimilation task showed that the intermediate group categorized /pa/, /pha/, /ka/, and /kha/, while the advanced group categorized /pha/ and /kha/. Both intermediate and advanced listener groups revealed high assimilation overlap for the three Korean stop contrasts in which two Korean stop consonants were assimilated to the same Chinese category, indicating their perceptual difficulty in distinguishing lenis stops from aspirated stops. The results of discrimination task showed that not only the intermediate group but also the advanced group performed poorly on the three Korean lenis-aspirated stop contrasts, suggesting that high assimilation overlap affected discrimination performance. These findings were also discussed in relation to the assimilation overlap scores.