Production and perception skill developments of Korean coronal obstruents by inexperienced English-speaking learners of Korean

Abstract

The present study investigates how speech production and perception abilities develop in second language learning among learners in a classroom setting. English-speaking students taking a first semester college course in Korean participated in both production and perception tasks. In the production task, the participants read a list of Korean frame sentences with target stimuli consisting of Korean /t t’ th s s’/ with /a/ in CV and VCV. To assess the production accuracy, native Koreans identified the consonants from the learners’ productions. In the perception task, the participants listened to the same corpus of Korean stimuli and identified the consonants with Korean orthography. The data were collected four times over two semesters: Week 5 or 6, and Week 13 or 14 of each semester. Results indicate that the learners’ overall production and perception abilities are correlated to each other in some but not all data collection times. Further analyses show that over two semesters, most learners did not improve much in overall perception abilities. Not much learning occurred either in production or perception for some sounds (e.g., /s/, /s’/). These findings suggest different learning units for production and perception as well as the powerful influence of native language.