초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This study attempts to investigate how correctly Korean learners can perceive native speakers’ production of the English high front tense and lax vowels /i/ and /I/ and high back tense and lax vowels /u/ and /U/ and also see how intelligible Korean speakers’ production of the tense and lax vowels is to native listeners. Two perception experiments were conducted. In the Korean learners’ identification task, 20 Koreans participated in identifying the target vowels which were produced by native speakers of English. Results showed that Korean learners identified the high back lax vowel significantly better than the corresponding tense vowel, but that the high front tense and lax vowels did not show a statistical difference. This might be due to the fact that the Korean high front vowel /i/ is more similar to the English tense vowel /i/ in terms of spectral features (F1 and F2) and that it is more likely to pattern with the English lax vowel /I/ in terms of duration. The spectral and durational conflict between the English front vowels /i/ and /I/ and the Korean vowel /i/may negatively lead to Korean listeners’ confusion in identifying the English tense vs. lax vowels /i/ and /I/. In native listeners’identification task, the same stimuli recorded by Korean learners were identified by native listeners of English to measure Korean learners’ speech intelligibility of the English tense and lax vowels. Results showed that native listeners identified the lax vowels /I/ and /U/ more correctly than the tense vowels /i/ and /u/. This indicates that native listeners tend to rely more on the durational cues than spectral cues in identifying the English tense and lax vowels as Korean high vowels /i/ and /u/ are more similar to the English lax vowels in terms of duration rather than acoustic/spectral properties.
