Production and perception of English vowel categories by native Korean speakers.

Abstract

This study deals with the production and perception of a second language (L2) by non-native speakers assessing phonetic convergence in their production and perceptual divergence. Production and perception of nine American English monophthongs and eight Korean monophthongs by the experienced and inexperienced Korean speakers were acoustically analyzed. The experiments consist of the production test, identification tests, and discrimination test. The experienced group showed relatively successful production of English vowels that have dissimilar acoustic properties with Korean vowels, while the inexperienced group showed complete phonetic interlingual identification. However, in perception, both groups successfully scored in the identification and discrimination tests, not showing perceptual identification between English and Korean. It suggests that two language systems mutually influence in one native phonetic space, and linguistic experience with L2 brings the reorganization of the phonological system, adding new phonemic categories for dissimilar L2 phones. The biased results in production and perception tests demonstrate that production of L2 is strongly related to the native phonemic categories, but perception is not. Therefore, the findings suggest that two different phonological systems are incorporated into the same phonetic space and linguistic experience with L2 boosts this process.