Asymmetries in the perception and production of english grapheme <o> by korean learners of english

Abstract

The current study investigated the impact of orthography on perception and production of English grapheme in foreign language acquisition. Also, the study purported to provide a test bed for the traditional assumption that perception precedes production. To this end, perception and production tasks of English words with the grapheme divided into pretest and posttest were conducted to 31 Korean learners of English. The stimulus words were 30 English words with English grapheme . The perception task was a multiple-choice identification test. The production task was to read the stimulus words and the production of the participants was recorded with the Goldwave program. After the pretest, training was held for 2 weeks and the posttest was administered. The results showed that orthography has an impact on perceiving and producing English grapheme across the tasks and the tests since the participants tended to replace [o]-quality vowels for the English target vowels. Specifically, the target vowels were frequently misperceived either as [o] or as [oU] across the pretest and posttest in the perception task. In the production task, however, target vowels tended to be mispronounced as [o]. The substitution of the target vowels with [o] whereby the second element of the target [oU] was omitted was especially salient across the tests. As for the relationship between perception and production, the precedence of perception over production was not found either in the pretest or in the posttest. Instead, an asymmetry between perception and production was detected since production accuracy tended to be significantly better than perception accuracy after training. Given that training on the target vowels of English grapheme yielded production improvements for the most of the target vowels but not perception improvements, perception clearly diverged from production. Thus, L2 training programs should consider the fact that perception is mainly involved in the auditory system while production mainly in the motor system.