Perception of English vowel length modulation due to vowel identity and the identity of the following consonant by Korean learners of English

Abstract

In English, consonant voicing has large effects on the previous vowel duration, as does the status of the vowel as tense or lax. Our aim is to examine the relationship between discrimination and identification of these contrasts by Korean L2 listeners. An ABX discrimination task shows little correlation between the two contrasts, so that listeners who distinguish English consonant voicing contrasts do not tend to do better with the English tense/lax contrasts. An identification task, however, indicates a strong correlation across the two different contrasts such that listeners who identify the correct underlying final consonant are able to identify the correct underlying vowel identity in their English perception. Further, comparing the participants’ performance on the two tasks shows a different relationship between discrimination and identification. For voicing contrasts, discrimination performance needs to reach a level of accuracy before the listeners improve in identification, suggesting that auditory discrimination is a foundation for identification. However, for the tense-lax contrast, the listeners’ performance in the two tasks is entirely uncorrelated, suggesting that part of the difficulty for the listeners acquiring the tense-lax contrast is that they auditorily attend to aspects of the signal which are inappropriate for identification.