ScholarWorks@성균관대학교

초록

Phonological preparation units in Korean speech production remain debated, spanning proposals for onset-based, syllable-based, and sub-syllabic body units. Building on recent evidence implicating the vowel nucleus as a candidate unit, the present study examined phonological preparation in both L1 Korean and L2 English to test whether unit-selection patterns extend across languages for Korean speakers. Using a low-load picture-naming priming paradigm, we manipulated phonological overlap across six conditions (no overlap, onset, nucleus, body, rime, syllable) and collected naming latencies from native Korean speakers in Korean (n = 70) and English (n = 101). Response times below 150 ms or above 3 s were excluded. Across both languages, nucleus overlap produced the strongest and most reliable facilitation effect, whereas onset overlap did not yield facilitation and other sub-syllabic overlaps showed no consistent benefits. These findings show that the nucleus operates as a stable preparation unit across languages for Korean speakers-a pattern compatible with articulatory phonology, where the temporal, acoustic, and prosodic prominence of vowel gestures, along with their in-phase coupling with onsets, allows them to function as the primary preparation unit. This challenges onset-first accounts and underscores the importance of sub-syllabic structure in models of speech planning.