Acoustic Cues in Korean High School Students’ L2 Phoneme Perception and Speech Segmentation

Abstract

This study investigates perceptual patterns in the categorization of English stop consonants regarding VOT and F0 by Korean learners of English. The effect of perception patterns on the segmentation of English sound sequences was also examined. With the stimuli of English stop consonants followed by conflicting vocalic cues, the subjects showed a degree of vowel?dependent perception in certain types of combinations, ignoring VOT cues. Also, students with high vowel?dependency performed significantly worse than those with low vowel?dependency on the word boundary perception test regarding VOT cue, implying that the native cue weighting strategy hinders L2 speech segmentation. The findings of this study show that the transfer of native cue weighting strategy may impede the use of crucial acoustic cues in L2 segmentation. Therefore, instruction based on the use of acoustic cues in perception is needed rather than instruction based on phonemes.