Perception and production of second language sound inventory by English-speaking learners of Korean

Abstract

This study investigates the perception of L2 sound inventory and its comparison with L2 production by eleven adult English-speaking novice learners of Korean in a classroom setting. We examined the perceptual identification and production accuracy of Korean consonants and vowels: eight monophthongs /i e ɛ ī u o ʌ ɑ/ both in isolation and following /p t k/ contexts, and fourteen consonants /p p’ ph t t’ th s s’ c c’ ch k k’ kh/ with /ɑ/ in word-initial position. Overall results indicated that most learners were better at production than perception. Such tendency was more apparent for consonants (except /s/) than vowels, for many learners exhibited a high performance in both perception and production of vowels. Results also showed that learners with more accurate production tended to exhibit more accurate perceptual identification. However, such observation applied only to vowels. Further, learners often had difficulty in both production and perception for the same vowels. Findings suggest rate differences in L2 sound learning; learning takes longer in perception than in production, and in consonants than in vowels. Findings also suggest that production-perception link is stronger in L2 vowel development, at least in the case of English speaking learners of Korean.