Perception and production of English geminate consonants across word boundaries by Korean learners and native speakers of English

Abstract

It is well-attested that consonant length is not lexically distinctive in English. However, the status of English geminate consonants has been in controversy as to whether they are phonetically distinctive over word or morpheme boundaries. Despite the controversy, there have been few studies that compare singletons and corresponding geminates with identical phrases and explore how L2 learners acquire them. This study investigated how native speakers of English (NE) and native speakers of Korean (NK) differently pronounced and perceived English singletons and geminates across word boundaries using 17 minimal pairs of English phrases. The results were analyzed in terms of manners and places of articulation, and voicing, and examined the relationship between perception and production of singleton and geminate pairs. In Experiment 1: Production, NK was almost as good as NE in terms of consonant duration. In Experiment 2: Perception, NK had difficulty differentiating between singletons and geminates perceptually, showing poor accuracy rates. The results of these two experiments showed a clear discrepancy between NK’s perception and production of the singletons and geminates across words and imply that production of such pairs be very loosely related to perception for NK learners of English.