A Study on Acoustic Characteristics and Korean EFL Learners’ Perception of English Voiceless Fricatives

Abstract

This paper aims to find the relationship between acoustic characteristics and Korean EFL learners’ perception of English voiceless fricatives. We examined four acoustic characteristics, spectral peak locations, normalized duration, center of gravity, and intensity, of three English voiceless fricatives using Praat and investigated Korean EFL learners’ perception of English voiceless fricatives through the MFC identification test. The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that Korean EFL learners did better in perceiving the English voiceless interdental fricative sound than English voiceless alveolar and palato-alveolar fricative sounds. Furthermore, the Spearman correlation test showed that normalized duration and intensity have significant relationships with learners’ perception of English voiceless fricative sounds.