Korean listeners’ sensitivity to language-specific phonetic details of children and adults’ vowel production in five different languages.

Abstract

Systematic differences in vowel production across languages have been demonstrated, even for so-called “shared” vowels. Starting from 10 months of age, language-specific vowel production patterns emerge in babbling [Boysson-Bardies et al. (1989)]. Vowel production data from a word repetition task in our laboratory also showed language-specific patterns emerging at 2 years of age. While there is research on adult and infant perception of non-native vowels produced by adults, there is little work on adult perception of children’s non-native vowels of different languages. The current study examined Korean adult listeners’ perception of vowels from five languages, Cantonese, English, Greek, Japanese, and Korean, produced by 2-, 5-year-old children, and adults. Consonant-vowel and vowel only stimuli were extracted from our vowel production data. Target vowels included /i/, /a/, and /u/, following velar and alveolar stops. Twenty native Korean adult listeners were asked to identify the vowels and rated their goodness. Results will be analyzed using both the formant frequencies and listeners’ judgments using a mixed effect model. [Supported by a Fulbright fellowship, NIDCD Grant 02932, and NSF Grant 0729140.]