Inter-language vowel perception and production by Korean and Japanese listeners

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This paper investigates the influence of phonological learning upon the perception of non-native vowels. Four groups of Korean and Japanese English learners, at two levels of English experience, and a group of older monolingual Korean listeners were assessed on the perception and production of Australian English monophthongal front vowels: /i:x e ae a:/. Korean is of interest, because of a recent phonological merger of two front vowels (/e/ and //spl epsi//), which has produced a generation split among speakers of Seoul dialect above and below 45-50 years of age. The present study is the first reported case of how a phonemic merger, resulting in cross-generation differences within a speech community, can influence speakers' perception ad production of non-native vowels. The effects of phonological learning on vowel perception was also observed in the tendency of the Japanese, but not the Korean listeners, to normalise tokens of non-native vowels for speaker-dependent durational variation, consistent with the respective phonological roles of vowel length in Japanese and Korean.