Washback and language change: An investigation of teachers’ perception of the Korean vowel length contrast

Abstract

The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the vowel length contrast in Korean is retained in teachers’ perception due to a washback effect. Previous studies have demonstrated that the vowel length contrast in Korean has been completely lost in the production of contemporary Seoul Korean (Kang et al., 2015). However, considering that this vowel contrast is still being prescriptively taught in the elementary school curriculum, we hypothesized that teaching linguistically extinct contrasts might influence speech perception. In order to investigate whether Korean teachers have regained the vowel length contrast, we conducted two perception experiments. Twenty-three Korean elementary school teachers and 30 university students (control group) from the Seoul area completed a discrimination task as well as a forced-choice identification test in which vowel length contrasts were manipulated at a ratio of 1:3. The results showed that teachers’ perceptual identification accuracy was significantly higher than that of the control group. Interestingly, the control group’s identification accuracy also exceeded chance level, indicating that Korean listeners still retained some perceptual sensitivity. These results suggest that the Korean vowel length contrast may not be completely lost in perception, and also that a washback effect from language teaching may inhibit language change.