A nonsense syllable confusion matrix task in Korean‐English bilingual children.

Abstract

Compared to extensive studies in bilinguals in adults and very young children, very few studies have investigated speech perception in school‐aged Korean‐English bilingual (KEB) children. Given that English (L2) and Korean (L1) have different contrast systems among consonants and vowels and children have different speech perception processing than adults, school‐aged KEB children are expected to have more complicated patterns of L2 perception. The main goal of the present study was to discern which set of L2 sounds are salient enough not to experience interference from L1. Ten KEB children at age 8–13 years were asked to identify 30 nonsense syllables of L2 sounds. The results showed that dissimilar consonants to Korean (i.e., /f,θ/) are most confusing to perceive than similar consonants with familiar contrasts (/p,k,b,g/) next to similar consonants with unfamiliar contrasts (/,,s,z/). More interestingly, perception performance in vowels showed the opposite pattern: a similar vowel (/ε/) was less correctly identified than unfamiliar vowels (/I,æ/). The present study suggests that L2 consonants, which cannot be mapped to any of the L1 sounds, are the most challenging to perceive. Nonetheless, groups of sounds that are patterned together cannot simply be explained with the L1 influence. For example, /f,θ/ are most confusing to KEB as well as English‐monolingual listeners (Phatak & Allen, 2007); yet confusion of /b/ with /θ/ is unique only to KEBs.