Perception of place-of-articulation contrasts of English word-final consonants in connected speech by Japanese and Korean second language learners

Abstract

An extension of a previous study examining Japanese listeners’ perception of place contrasts of English word-final stops in connected speech (Ito, 2010) was carried out by administering the same experiment to Korean listeners. Stimuli embedded in a carrier sentence and produced in fast casual speech were presented in a three-alternative forced choice identification test, adopting minimal triplets (e.g., sip-sit-sick, bib-bid-big, Kim-kin-king) followed by an adverb starting with /p/, /t/, or /k/. Data for 24 Korean listeners were compared with the previous data for 24 Japanese and 24 American English (AE) listeners. Whereas Japanese listeners had exhibited severe difficulty in perceiving place contrasts of nasal and voiceless stops, Korean listeners were expected to have much less perceptual difficulty on those contrasts because of the different L1 phonological rules of final stops. Results revealed that Koreans’ response accuracy was much higher than that of Japanese on voiceless stops (Korean 82%, Japanese 67%, AE 90%) and nasal stops (Korean 96%, Japanese 66%, AE 98%), conforming to the predictions. The contrasting performance between Korean and Japanese listeners on nasal stops was especially remarkable, strongly supporting the notion that Japanese listeners’ difficulty in perceiving place contrasts of word-final nasals is due to their L1phonological rules.