The English l sound produced by Korean students.

Abstract

This study examined the lateral l sound produced by 16 Korean students in order to tap a possibility of using acoustical and perceptual criteria to distinguish lateral variants and eventually to assess student’s English pronunciation skills. The subjects read a short story in a quiet office at normal speed. Those words with the lateral sound in onset or coda positions and before a vowel of the following word were analyzed using PRAAT. The following results are shown. First, the majority of the subjects produced the clear l regardless of the contexts. Some students produced the sound as the Korean flap or the English glide /r/. A few missing cases were also seen. Second, the dark l was mostly produced by the subjects of English majors in coda position with a few cases before a vowel in a phrase. Visual displays from the computer analysis were helpful in determining lateral variants but sometimes personal listening to the given sound after temporal manipulation would be necessary in the cases of fast and weak productions of the target words. Further studies would be desirable to compare native productions of the lateral sound with those of non‐native speakers.