The Perception of English Tense and Lax Vowels in Contextual Variation by Korean Young Learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study attempts to investigate how the phonological feature of L1 affects L2 learners’ perception of non-native contrastive phonemes. Since vowel length is easily affected by its contextual variables, this study examines whether the participants differently perceive English tense/lax vowels according to the difference in the manner of articulation and voicing contrast. Two different perception tests (ABX test and Identification test) are conducted by 19 students in the 6th grade of primary school. A total number of 112 stimuli for the ABX test and 48 trials for the identification test in Ci# and Cɪ# structures were examined for three consecutive days. The major findings indicate as follows. 1) The overall performance of the discrimination test (87.13%) is better than that of the identification test (37.72%) which indicates Korean speakers could differentiate the tense contrastive phonemes at the phonetic level but have difficulties to categorize the sounds. 2) Regarding contextual variables (manner of articulations and voicing contrasts) in postvocalic obstruents, the result of experiments verifies that Korean participants minutely use vowel length as an acoustic cue in perception tests. 3) Concerning the results, pedagogical implications for effective learning the target sounds, and further research are suggested.

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