The effects of prenasal raising of American English /æ/ on the identification of American English vowels by native Japanese and Korean listeners

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate the effect of prenasal raising of American English /ae/ on the identification of the vowel by native Japanese and Korean listeners by comparing the identification accuracy of /ae/ in preplosive and prenasal context by these two listener groups. Native Japanese speakers generally equate /ae/ with Japanese low vowel /a/ whereas native Korean speakers identify /ae/ with Korean mid front vowel /e/, and /ae/-/ɛ/ is one of the most difficult English vowel pairs for Korean speakers to discriminate (Ingram & Park 1997, Frieda & Nozawa 2007). It was expected that Korean listeners would identify raised /ae/ in prenasal context as /ɛ/ or /eɪ/, but they mistakenly identified /ɛ/ and /eɪ/ as /ae/ far more frequently than /ae/ as /ɛ/ or /eɪ/. The results revealed that while Japanese listeners' identification accuracy of /ae/ is significantly lower in prenasal context than in preplosive context, Korean listeners' identification accuracy of /ae/ is unaffected by the raising of /ae/. Korean listene...