earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to identify difficult American English vowel pairs for Korean students to learn. Most of the phonetic acquisition models are based on acoustic similarity. However, acoustically similar English /ʌ-ɑ/ pair is reported to be easily discriminated by Korean speakers. This implies acoustic similarity is not sufficient to explain Korean learners' difficulties in English vowel acquisition. Therefore, this research introduces English phoneme-Korean correspondence in tandem with acoustic similarity to identify difficult English vowel pairs for Korean students. In the experiment, 46 high school students matched 8 Korean vowels to 11 English vowels presented in IPA with word forms. Then they listened to English vowels in h_d context and matched them to Korean vowels. The results show that English /i-ɪ/, /e-ɛ/, /u-ʊ/ and /ʌ-ɔ/ pairs are difficult for Korean speakers to discriminate and the perceptual assimilation of English /ʌ, ʊ, o/ appear to be more influenced by English phoneme-Korean correspondence pattern than by acoustic similarity