Korean talkers’ cue weighting perception strategies in perceiving English /ɑ/, /ɔ/ and /ʌ/ in comparison with American talkers’

Abstract

Korean university learners of American English have difficulty differentiating between English /?/, /?/ and /?/ as well as between /i/ and /?/, /?/ and /ae/ and /?/ and /u/. Yang (2010) and Hong (2011, 2012) discussed extensively Korean talkers’ perception of the latter three vowel pairs only. This paper, on the other hand, focuses on Korean talkers’ perception of English /?/, /?/ and /?/, among which Korean talkers have difficulty differentiating. This paper, using a forced-choice identification test with spoken hVd stimuli in Hillenbrand et al. (1995), hypothesizes that Korean and American talkers use different cues with different weighting despite the existence of corresponding similar Korean vowels (Morrison 2002, Escudero and Boersma 2004, Holt and Lotto 2006, Ylinen et al. 2009). Based on the measured duration, F0, F1, F2 and F3, stepwise Discriminant Analysis, a multivariate analysis, was waged on the identification performance for English /?/, /?/ and /?/ by American and Korean talkers, deriving two discriminant functions. These functions are latent variables (i.e., linear functions of weighted cues) and were used to plot vowel stimuli and vowel group centroids in perceptual vowel space with two latent variables. As a result, a given vowel stimulus will be plotted closest to its vowel group centroid. By comparing Korean and American talkers’ models, it was found that Korean talkers use different strategies in perceiving the three vowels in question from American talkers as to how those latent functions were composed of for English vowel perception. The two latent variables explained 98.3% of American talkers’ identification performance while 71.3% of Korean talkers’ identification. These results suggest that Korean talkers use different perception strategies in differentiating between the three vowels from American talkers and their perception strategies are not stable.